Building a YouTube Empire Brick By Brick

[Astroo]

Wait so youre gaining that many subs and views just from reddit??

 

[avilux]

Wait so youre gaining that many subs and views just from reddit??

Well my average now is like around 30 subs daily gained. This could easily double itself within a day if there was a nice targeted Reddit promotion. If you make front page of a subreddit, you could easily get thousands if not tens of thousands of views. The only thing is it needs to be good content. None of my content was amazing as of thus far, or at least in my opinion it wasn't. So this personal channel tells crazy life stories of mine and that interests people, but I need it to become even better before I will go fully promoting it. The day I have a video I truly believe in my heart of hearts that is viral material, it'll easily get 100K views in a day or even more. I have some viral ideas and I'll put them into action within the next few weeks or so.

 

[avilux]

Report #13 952 subs, 139,730 views (still didn't update). Realtime: 5,800+. So it's no lie that my channel's growth has declined a little, and that's perfectly alright. There's no way I'm letting this channel sit dormant for much longer. It's a long night, I've been working on the gaming channel. Today was a good day. I spoke with a YouTube employee, directly. I've been waiting for this day for over 6 years. I'm finally glad I have a YouTube employee's direct contact incase of flagging or monetization strikes. I had one of those YT Consultation's and was able to find out quite a lot, at least just because I had a long list of questions prepared to fire. I"ll be able to use YT Space since I'm eligible, and hopefully by the time I go I'll be good on both channels 10K will happen soon on this baby. Really I'm just glad that I finally have this thing off my back. I know my channel won't be screwed, and I sent it over to YT for review. I've had beta testers for YT Heroes review my channel and they said it looked all good, so I think I'm pretty much in the clear. Worst case scenario an age restriction here or there or demonetization for a video, whatever, I can make do with that. Peace

 

[Jimmu]

NIce. I am really curious were this journey will take you. Will be watching.

 

[avilux]

Report #15 1,060 subscribers. 145,697 total views. I'm so glad we were able to finally hit past 1K! Realtime views was well after the 2 reddit promotions, being: 11K+. I'll be doing some more reddit promotions soon

 

[topcalibercontent]

This is a really fascinating and inspiring thread. I love Youtube videos and so it's fun to get a bit of "behind the scenes."

Is there anything you can tell us about how long on average you spend making videos?

 

[avilux]

Report #16 Did another smaller reddit promotion and we're sitting at 1,111 subscribers today. 13K+ realtime views and 151,249 total views. I'm extremely excited now that I received a paycheck to figure out exactly what I want to do over the next few months. I know for sure I have to get a viral ready video before December 1st, however my real goal would be before November 1st. Basically I know vlogs aren't viral ready. I can get to the front of r/videos and even if it's the best vlog in the world, it still won't attract as much people as I'd like it to. If I'm to reach 100K subscribers before the year ends, I need to do some serious videos. I really love ThatWasEpic's channel as I just found it from a friend's recommendation. Of course I want to be a unique YouTuber, but it's funny how some of the things he and other big channels do get a lot of attention. I act crazy in public on so many of my outings and I do wish I could record more of it. Unfortunately, usually when I go crazy it's rather not the best idea for me to film personally.

I'm excited to hit 25K to start a Patreon and then 50K to hire a team to record me and get my channel to the next level. Even the simple things that my friends and I do, such as jumping and swimming in public water fountains, dancing on buses, rapping with homeless people, engaging in friendly conversations with police officers while stealing shopping carts, throwing tv's and furniture off of rooftops, etc. would be hilarious to the average person's eye.

I'm not going for the "drugs" niche nor anything close to "spiritual" or "hippie" like. And I certainly don't want to be in the "business" niche. I'd prefer to make my own niche. Become the symbol of insanity on YouTube. Break world records and crush epic challenges. Get out of our comfort zone and help others too. I feel rather limited, especially now with the fact that I'm back at home (for the time being). But soon I'll be a free bird again. 2017 will be the year I'll get a few million subscribers. There's just no room for failure anymore. Success is certain. No matter what happens, I will dedicate as much of my earnings and energy into gaining more fame. And the haters? Oh man, keep it coming. I love it.

It's actually quite fantastic. I thought getting rejected by gorgeous women multiple times in a row would hurt. And it did at first. Same with being in the same room as millionaire CEO's and networking with them. But now? I could care less. And getting death threats from random strangers online hiding behind keyboards? Oh man, that's so far down on the list that I honestly feel like they're compliments now. I'll be laughing to the bank next year.

Here's a fun quote for you guys, a recent lover sent me: "You must be a JEW. You are a parasite scam artist, money-hungry loser who provides no value in your life. Your existence is a complete waste. You need to start working and providing value instead of scamming people and rambling to these kids as if you have wisdom. You are a complete idiot and LOSER."

My favorite thing about this was the fact that I have zero jewish blood in me, and that this was on a video that had zero relation to money or scamming or anything of that sort. And maybe I'm wrong here, but if people ask me for advice and I get messages that I'm helping them out... I think I deserve some credit. Gotta love the keyboard warriors!

 

[avilux]

This is a really fascinating and inspiring thread. I love Youtube videos and so it's fun to get a bit of "behind the scenes."

Is there anything you can tell us about how long on average you spend making videos?

Sure, so right now my vlogging channel takes a few hours per video pretty much. And here's why: Anywhere from 5-60 minutes to record a video. Sometimes I make vlogs as short as 3 minutes, other times as long as 25 minutes. Sometimes it takes multiple times to get "in the zone" and record everything right. Then add in like anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours to get the video onto my computer, edit it, compile everything and then hit Render (When I hit render I go to sleep at night and it takes my computer anywhere from 30 minutes to 90 to get 1080p footage). For editing I've been doing more jumpcuts lately to please the subs, I put in background music at a low volume, and of course intro's and outro's. The intro and outro took me personally like 4 hours to make, even though I was following tutorials and they're decent in my opinion. I had a few fans like them.

The best thing to follow to make a perfect vlog is this. The first 5 seconds matter the most. Get to the point. Make it interesting. HEY GUYS ITS X AND TODAY WE'LL BE BREAKING THE WORLD RECORD FOR X! Then follow it up by an intro. Make it 3 seconds max. Moving, colorful, chill music. Then get straight to the point again with your vlog. Don't make it clickbait casey neistat style. The title being the last frame of the vlog. Then make sure to cut everytime you mess up, breathe too long, or there's extra "fluff" info. And 5-10 quality minutes is what you should be aiming for before doing an animated outro. A good background helps keep people interested too.

Then after the video editing is done, I upload it the next day and that takes a few minutes to come up with targeted keywords, description, title, and then get TubeBuddy to use the template Cards and Annotations and all that. Then I change the descriptions of all videos with TubeBuddy to get them to redirect to my latest upload, I feature it on the channel's sub page, and then I feature it in all my videos, by making it the branded default. And then I can go promote it on other social media platforms. Reddit being the best. Anywhere from spending a few minutes to a couple hours posting on multiple targetted subreddits and engaging with all comments.

This however will definitely change as I want to increase the quality of my videos to get some more "viral" ready stuff soon. Oh and I forgot about Photoshop, but I use it just for thumbnails really. That takes a couple minutes usually

 

[hiimanshu]

Have you had any luck using upvote services on Reddit to attempt to manipulate it towards 'rising' and eventually on to the front page?

 

[topcalibercontent]

What a great response, thanks so much for taking the time to go into such depth. It's clear you put a lot of thought and effort into every element of this, I hope it brings you the success you deserve.

 

[Motherdex]

Following! I just checked out TubeBuddy... looks very cool. I have a brand new channel that I am trying to build and I am new to all of this so thanks!

 

[growsocialworld]

Ya real videos will work great....

 

[avilux]

Have you had any luck using upvote services on Reddit to attempt to manipulate it towards 'rising' and eventually on to the front page?

Sometimes I do use upvote services on Reddit. It depends. There's a TON of obscure subreddits (under 1-2K followers) that I like to post on every now and then. The reason for this being is that basically there is only one page, and that is the front page. So even people visiting in a few weeks can see my post and if I upvote it with some of my other accounts and get my friends to upvote it, it's easily there. I use upvote.club and it works really well for the big subreddits, such as the one today. I wouldn't recommend spending more than a few dollars MAX though, as you don't need that much upvotes. And for the most part, unless it's a really large one I'd only throw 10-20 ($1-2) worth of upvotes at a link. You just have to be smart about it. I only found out about upvote services within the last month I believe, so I'll be using that definitely a lot for the gaming channel.

Report #17 12K+ realtime views. Subs are at 1,173. And total views are 157,987. I'm a little saddened as I got banned from a subreddit today. It's only temporary.. but come on. I was frontpage of it and it had close to a million followers. I was on there for about 4 hours and the remainder could've gotten me an additional 9K+ views, maybe way more, who knows. I messaged the mods, because I know today was the weekend and so they relaxed the rules a little bit. Turns out they do allow some videos.. but they said that the context changes a bit when talking about "relatively popular" channels such as my own. Well that's a little silly, mine's still very small. And I'll be promoting my channel even if I'd have 100M subscribers. I'm always hungry for more. Of course as I grow, I'll let my subs do the marketing for me (for the most part).

I have some crazy ideas for offline marketing which I can't wait to invest in next year. One for example that's rather simple would just be shipping out tens of thousands of stickers to subscribers so they can paste the colorful and crazy stickers everywhere across the nation's cities. Another would be enlisting the help of the homeless. I'd be giving them small gigs and they'd be helping me out with large marketing in big cities. Those are rather the mild ones though, and I can't reveal the truly good ones But you get the point.

 

[Asharvin66]

Nice journey OP, i have always wanted to go into youtube.

 

[avilux]

Report #18 I decided to do these much earlier in the day, as it's better to get things out of the way to make room for more later. So I'm sitting at 1,203 subscribers right now, 163,859 total views, and 12K+ realtime views. The 6th of this month, the last report on analytics says I made $3.22, so that's the second best day I've had so far. Multiple days around $3 or more. First best day was the 24th of last month being $5.17. I'm excited, as I know I'm sure to have a day beat $10 this month. Again the numbers are small, but nothing to complain about. I know fully well that my content isn't appropriate for all ages and it's not advertiser friendly, so some demonetization here and there and lower paying ads is alright. At 100K subscribers I think I'll be able to afford a simple lifestyle, not bad. That's in 2 months. Next year will be even more exciting.

I've got a fair amount of reddit promotion in small subreddits to do later tonight. I think it'll be worth it long term. At least if it doesn't get much views, I'm happy making backlinks all over the web for my channel. The more places that people and search engines see my name, the better.

 

[avilux]

Report #19 Sitting at 1,214 subscribers. Unfortunately yesterday was a pretty bad day, but hey we all have those. First off I wasn't too pleased with the video I had to release, but just was out of footage and wasn't able to record and yesterday was rather hectic. I usually render at night but wasn't able to so turns out yesterday I figured out there was audio problems and the lighting was terrible and overall, not one of my best videos. But I still didn't think it was THAT bad. I'm not quite sure if it's from that, or something else but I suddenly lost like 8 or so subscribers within an hour of posting. It's always painful to lose some subs, but hey, it needs to happen every now and then. Just have to think of the long term. Second off, I got my first video flagged but it wasn't taken down, just age-restricted. Unfortunately this is my main video which means it got demonetized and there's little hope in it anymore. It went from 3,400+ daily views to suddenly 1/10th of what it used to get. It could've easily gotten to 10K daily but it's just a sign to market more videos to get views. It's a numbers game. Total views is 170,073. Realtime views went down to 8,900 and is decreasing a bit. I think there was a third thing contributing to the slow growth but I forgot about it, so it's all good. I'll just have to figure out something soon, which I always do, and we'll be back stronger than ever before.

One more thing which I find funny, a lot of youtubers that I send business emails to don't even bother responding. I have tracking on so I know they've seen it, and I've tried multiple examples now to see if there would be a change. Nope. I'm just asking what kind of promotion they can offer and for what prices, because of course some people may not feel comfortable with shoutouts or the usual. And I'd be perfectly willing to even pay for a collab video, but hey, it's fine. I'll find somebody eventually, that's not what worries me. I just feel.. bad for some of these youtubers. Someone told me long ago that if I started up big accounts again, one day I'd be able to do consulting as a side job. Get paid a few grand to come in for an hour to talk to some board at some large company. A lot of people already like what I write on all the forums I post. I know some people irl who even beg me for help. I guess in a way it's good that there's few who know how to make good money. I'm not talking about selling out, but when I see articles about youtubers with 100K+ subscribers living on bread crumbs.. like come on, that's just someone who doesn't have a SINGLE clue on how to turn this into a business. I'm not in it for the money, but you can't act like it's a hobby forever. Unfortunately for some of the channels that I've contacted, they don't realize it now, but one day I will be their competition. I'm not competing against anyone directly, but if you have a channel targeting similar niches as mine and you don't bother to even respond to a simple business email, don't expect much mercy when I'll come along and wash over you like a tsunami. I wish I could work with everybody, but some people just aren't willing. And maybe this post may seem a little grim.. but I'm thinking back to even some of the responses I got back when I was trying to buy gaming channels. One person literally told me to go Fuck myself. Very professional. I do take note of such examples, and I do keep lists of people who have helped me, and as well as those who have acted foolishly.

 

[avilux]

Report #20 Total views: 173,878. Total subscribers lost: 196 (of course both of these stats are higher, because these are lifetime without the past 48 hours). Realtime views: 4,700 unfortunately. I appealed the demonetization and age-restriction but still no response, so we'll see. I'd like to get the same features as some of the larger Youtubers soon, that I can appeal for ALL demonetized videos. I'm not so upset about losing money, it's more just if it's possible to get it back it'd be nice. Also, some of the videos are just weird. Where one day it's monetized, the next it's not, then it just keeps cycling. And some of them I have no idea why they'd be demonetized, while others I'm surprised are still running. Very interesting system. The thing that upsets me most is just that the age-restriction basically cost me thousands of views daily, but oh well. It was expected, however not so much on that video. But anyways, we're at 1,235 subs.

I might go to the local universities and hire some college kids for videos and marketing. I'm not worried about the 100K goal. It will be achieved. Just one viral video, even on the last day, and voila. I'm studying many other channels and their histories, trying to figure out what's the next best approach. I've got many ideas, but I have to be 100% confident in order to invest my money.

 

[avilux]

Report #21 A little late coming back from the city, but the results are good. Yesterday I had my little problem resolved. They put monetization back on and since the age restriction's been lifted, I've been seeing a big increase in views again. It's still much lower than when it was before, but I think it's just gotta warm up again. Way better than 1/10th though. My subs: 1,289 Realtime views: 6,400+ Total views: 176,320

I launched a test ad on Reddit with a $5 spend to see how it goes. CPC on reddit is super cheap compared to all other platforms, but the ad won't go live till tomorrow (unless it's not approved, but again, won't know till tomorrow).

 

[DanielOnYouTube]

I'm really liking this journey so far and am following it very closely.

It seems you've grown your channel(s) primarily from Reddit traffic, and I was just wondering, how many Reddit accounts do you have/use to post to lots of sub-reddit's everyday? Also, do you bother to get VPS for each Reddit account, or do you just keep the same IP and everything and create accounts as you go?

The reason I ask is because in my experience, for every 9 replies, I can post one of my videos 1 time. This is so I don't get shadow-banned or whatever. However, I'd love to be able to post my videos to multiple sub-reddits through out the day.

 

[Astroo]

Can you explain how youre growing so much? I could use some help with my youtube page