Building a YouTube Empire Brick By Brick

Might as well back up my thread that I made a few days ago in the Making Money section. And this is a journey to follow after the Digital Marketing thread was finished just a few minutes ago.

I welcome you to the crazy adventures of AVILUX and I'm sure you'll enjoy the ride. If not, at best you'll learn something that could your IM career.

Today is the first day I'm deciding to go HAM on my personal YT channel. I haven't been able to focus much on it as I was quite busy working on my marketing company over the past couple of months. My first video went live on the 19th of March this year. Now I'm 60+ videos in with 317 subscribers.

My first goal will be aiming for 1,000 subscribers. From there on it should be much smoother sailing for 10,000 subscribers. All my attention will be focused on this. Split attention can destroy anything, and even though I believe slightly in multi-tasking, I must test out how well I work when I apply all my efforts into creating this.

Even though I've worked with millions of followers on Youtube before, I've never had a personal channel before. (I mean, I tried once before but only uploaded 2 videos or so and never bothered to promote it, so that doesn't really count.)

I will show you step by step on how to create a YT empire. My niche? It's rather unique. It's not for the broad audience, I'll tell you that. I'm a little nontraditional with my videos and my general marketing approaches. I'm not focused on the money. I'm just focused on building a solid base for this channel now, so that I'm able to have a cement floor for my Empire in the months to come.

Where am I now? A few days left into my rent at this current apartment before I'll probably have to borrow money from my uncle in order to sublet or find a roommate or something next week.

Am I stressed out? Only partially, really the pressure's coming from the fact that I want to DOMINATE.

I'M HUNGRY TO DOMINATE AND EXCEL IN WHAT I'M BEST AT. I cannot stand to be average.

Other than having 300 subs, I also have over 51K total views and one of my best videos is towering above the rest, approaching quickly 20K views.

Report #1 I shall spend tonight rendering tomorrow's video, and then the rest of the time will be left up to promoting my channel as much as possible. I shall be using Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Forums and other YT channels to promote. And one post on FB.

I'm already running Followliker for my IG account which has over 12K followers but most are ghost at this point. (There's been periods of time where I just stopped caring about my personal IG totally and engagement is CRAP!) I'm messaging nearly 100 people right now with a picture and a decent message to get them to subscribe. I shall do a promotion post tonight as well.

I will use Twitter to build a brand new account just for engaging with people for certain hashtags. I shall be trying to connect with as many people as possible tonight.

For reddit, I will be using multiple accounts. Some will be "spam" where they just post to many subreddits the same video(s), while others will follow the 90/10 rule to try and maintain quality.

For forums, I shall try and find some tonight that will fit in my niche and build quality accounts there.

Long-term, the strategy is to give, give, give and finally get.

Thank you for sharing bro.

Do you know if putting too much ads in 10 mins videos affects it in a negative way ?
I'm putting like 5 ads/vid and I don't know If it's hurting it.
btw. Following I'm also on a yt journey after a month of work with 5 channels, I made about 500$ and i hope to at least double it in the next month.

dawniey said:

Do you know if putting too much ads in 10 mins videos affects it in a negative way ?
I'm putting like 5 ads/vid and I don't know If it's hurting it.
btw. Following I'm also on a yt journey after a month of work with 5 channels, I made about 500$ and i hope to at least double it in the next month.

Click to expand...

Personally, I've experienced very low viewer retention on videos with ads in it.

Just curious about the Reddit posting. Will you be using different VPS/IP's for each Reddit account? I heard they're really strict and ban people like crazy. Look forward to seeing where this goes. I'm going full-tilt with my YouTube journey starting September 1st!

What camera do you use for shooting videos?

tokokipiani said:

What camera do you use for shooting videos?

Click to expand...

Samsung S7 Edge front and back camera. They're pretty decent, cheapest 4K you can get. I tried Osmo 4K, aka the "selfie camera" but it was a pile of shit. I'd like to upgrade in the future and have professional audio recording as well, but those upgrades have to wait for another year probably.

DanielOnYouTube said:

Just curious about the Reddit posting. Will you be using different VPS/IP's for each Reddit account? I heard they're really strict and ban people like crazy. Look forward to seeing where this goes. I'm going full-tilt with my YouTube journey starting September 1st!

Click to expand...

I wish you luck with yours as well. I do not, as I only use a couple accounts max. I would if it'd be more than 5-6 accounts. Maybe 3-4 if heavy posting for each one. I try to go for quality over quantity. I've been banned from many subreddits though haha.

dawniey said:

Do you know if putting too much ads in 10 mins videos affects it in a negative way ?
I'm putting like 5 ads/vid and I don't know If it's hurting it.
btw. Following I'm also on a yt journey after a month of work with 5 channels, I made about 500$ and i hope to at least double it in the next month.

Click to expand...

Too much ads will definitely turn off the viewer. Go for as little advertising as possible to fully engage the viewer. Also don't abuse annotations, but make sure to fully utilize them. As in only have them up for a few seconds and don't make them too spammy..

Report #2 Well the past couple of days have certainly been hectic. I've moved out and am free to journey around the world.. but the stress levels are sort of returning. I know exactly what I'd like to do though. I'd like to work on some gaming channels next to this personal. I decided I can't put the personal full throttle just yet, as I need cash immediately. It's going well though.

360 subscribers and approaching 60K+ views. I decided today I shall start posting daily again. I was posting every 2 days before, and I might return to that one day but for now I just need as much content out there as possible. It might turn off some subscribers, but it doesn't matter. I just need content and views coming in. I've been promoting a bit on Reddit and August was my best month for earnings so far. I think it's going to be a little under $9 lol, but it's something. It's definitely better than the past 2 months with $3 and $4.

I've started building relationships with other YouTubers and would like to attend some YT networking events in the future months. Networking events are definitely great for anyone from making friends to collab with to investors to employers too.

avilux said:

I'M HUNGRY TO DOMINATE AND EXCEL IN WHAT I'M BEST AT. I cannot stand to be average.

Click to expand...

Eyyy very coked out! Good shit

interested to see you empire growing ..... i am just to lazy for doing videos...so much time

And we're back! Sorta, hopefully. Anyways, I've been posting on another forum (more YouTube specific) and it's helping me keep track. I'm restarting this, however you can still look back at my first posts to see the progress I've made. My personal goal is to get to 100K before Dec. 31st. Here's all the reports I've posted on there so far:

Report #1 Yesterday I posted a link in r/Teenagers and that did pretty well. I think I'll post around a couple more links tonight on Reddit (already have a couple, but none really front page, at least not for long) and then call it a day. Right now we're up from 533 to 563 in just a little over 24 hours. I've reached a new height as realtime says, over 6,000 views in the past 48 hours, steadily approaching 6,100. Total views moved up from 83,020 to 85,235. So far it seems like this month is doing better than last month in terms of unsubscribers, however for those curious my lifetime unsubs is 98. This doesn't include the past 2 days which I think would bring it up to 100 or so. I'm trying to increase the quality in my content but also I'm alright with unsubscribers. My niche is interesting but I find it hilarious how people will unsubscribe over one video or my political beliefs (which I don't even bring up that much) or my vulgarity. I think of it as weeding out the bad and purifying my channel. I'd rather have loyal subscribers who I engage with a lot than just a bunch who are trolls or don't do much for me.

I wish I could connect with this channel that's similar to mine. She's got a little more subscribers than me but she's not as consistent with the uploads. She's not ready to take it to the next level, and I can respect that. However I do feel like I'll have to really up my search for a full on collab partner. It's just that there's so few people who'd be similar niche, similar size AND nearly as motivated as I am. I know there's someone out there, but it's a little sad knowing so few care about growing large channels. I'm staying consistent with daily uploads and I'm even doing a secondary channel now with daily uploads of clips as a backup. I have a burning desire to dominate and succeed, and it seems a lot of YouTubers are passionate but they give up too easily when certain challenges face them or they're just not willing to take it further. Anyways, I've also gone ahead and am in the middle of a purchase for an inactive gaming channel. It has 63K+ subs but even if just 10% of them will be active again, I can both kickstart it up and funnel traffic to my other gaming channel. And then within a month or two I can funnel traffic from both gaming channels when they're large to my personal. It's a totally different niche but I'm sure I'll get a fair amount. The other gaming channel will definitely go viral within the next month or so with a bunch of games coming out and early gameplay

Report #2 I'm at 596 subscribers, 88,367 views and approaching nearly 7,000 views over the past 48 hours! I'm quite happy with where my channel's going and I spent a few hours late last night creating a decent intro and lovely outro, decent banner and profile picture. Much better now that it's updated and even more personalized. Now I'll just need to fix it up or pay someone to do an even better job soon. Always want to see progression. I'm thinking of purchasing TubeBuddy pretty soon to be able to bulk edit all my videos to focus on the latest video every day.

Turns out for some reason I lost a fair bit of subs on the 20th, 7 but I did come out 23 positive. I think what might've happened is that with increased advertising I got an influx of subs and then people saw my other videos (maybe a Trump one or a drug one) and they didn't like it too much. And that's fine, again. Total unsubs now is 105.

My goal really is to get some late night promotion going here tonight and hopefully hit 600 before bed. I think I'll advertise on Instagram pretty soon but that usually results in just a couple extra subs. Quite funny considering I have a 12,400 (it's an MMJ niche) but then again so many people are too lazy to just click a link to get them outside of the app. Cross platform promotion always gets a little tough. I think with the Instagram what I'll do is try and use that to get some free products again. Back when I used to run a large MMJ network last year I got free glass worth a lot of money and other stuff all the time. I don't really need it, but I would love to do some epic giveaways at 1K, 2K, 5K, 10K, etc. I already gave away a small little bracelet at 500 but that doesn't really count as a giveaway I guess. I said I'd randomly give it to the first person who messaged me lol. Didn't even need to sub to the channel. At 1K I might giveaway a Pink Floyd skateboard or a pair of Ray Bans (unfortunately even though I used to collect a bunch of them, I had sometimes pairs just too small for me) and actually try and make it more professional so it gives me an influx.

I think giveaways for the most part are silly but I do want to give a lot of stuff away over the next few months. I'd love to do some crazy record breaking giveaways at 50K and 100K subs. I have some ideas but I don't want to share until later A proper giveaway on a large channel can definitely net some great results. Also I have a few crazy video ideas for 1K and 2K subscribers. Might get a fair amount of shares. Overall I'm happy where my channel's heading.

I'm sorry, but I have to add this in.. I find it silly how people in my niche don't care much about YouTube. Like, there's some who realize it's a business.. but a lot just give me weak responses. "Don't want to taint the experience" as in, he doesn't want to market his channel. That's the latest message I got. And this isn't the first time someone said this to me. Some people just generally don't care about growing their channel. If it grows, it grows. If not, whatever. I'd like to work with someone who runs a spiritual channel or an MMJ channel or even someone who just lives in Las Vegas. Not worried though, definitely will find someone. The best thing ever would be finding multiple people. Creating a master mind group.

Want an inspiration? RSD. Real Social Dynamics. Tyler and Papa are the founders. They have a shared mansion where them and a bunch of high energy guys create motivational videos on how to self progress and dominate in picking up girls. They're also dominating their niche. Why? Because not only do they provide an insane amount of quality content, but they're very passionate about what they do. If only I could get a team together, all of us would benefit from each other's subs and we'd rise through the ranks much quicker. Or something like FAZE clan, but that's a worse example. Anyways, I wish you a good one.

Report #3 629 subs and 91,356 views. I reached an all-time high of 7,600+ in 48 hours and it keeps shifting now from 7,400-7,500. I'm a little upset about the YouTube Heroes news but oh well, won't let that stop me from producing my content. I'm really excited to be able to start work on the gaming channel I invested in, it's just around the corner, nearly everything's set up. Hopefully I'll be able to get it tonight, and if not later this weekend. One of my videos is quickly gaining traction which is good, considering my other most viewed video sort of stopped once it hit past 30,000 views. Not too much exciting things happen, but I'm glad where the channel's heading.

Report #4 Posting a little late here tonight just because today was hectic. So. We got front page of r/Videos for a little bit before going on the controversial section. This resulted in hitting a new all-time high of 18,000 views within the past 48 hours! I'm sitting at 690 subscribers now, but it's funny because whenever Reddit comes into play for promotion I see a GIANT jump in subs and then.. a bunch of unsubs shortly after. So if it wasn't for some of my other controversial content, I'd probably have an extra 10-15 subs who left quickly. But anyways, again, weeding out those who don't want to stick around and judge quickly.

Total views: 98,917! Nearly at 100K (although I know we beat it by far!)

Can't wait to hit 700 subs hopefully by the time I wake up! Today was interesting, for those who might've not seen my post, I had a person admit to false flagging half my videos. I've sent abuse reports to YouTube and hopefully they get that sorted out. I've been a little less paranoid recently though. I feel like I'm staying enough within the guidelines. I'll make softer videos though, but we have plenty of interesting stories to tell still! Anything from my experience in Military Camp to that time I nearly killed someone this summer to even helpful stuff for how teens can make a few grand over the summer doing easy online gigs. Stay tuned for tomorrow's update!


Report #5 We're up to 716 subscribers! Over the past 48 hours it's up to 19K (although it did fall from 21K earlier today) and for total views I think we're well past 110K but I can't say for sure because Analytics is behind in updates. Yesterday's post on reddit gave me a lot of feedback to work with and I think I'll be editing and cutting my stories a lot more now to get to the point. I'm super excited to be gently approaching 1,000 subscribers! I'm going to purchase TubeBuddy so I can have access to the bulk features as now I'm close to upload nearly 100 videos. Bulk annotations and cards will help make my latest uploads in ranking and I'm slowly approaching a point where responding to every single comment may be getting very tough, so canned responses will help address that.

I'm creating some plans and strategies for what I should do when I hit certain levels, such as 10K I'll definitely go for YT Space and maybe 20-30K I'll set up a Patreon (as long as I have a valid reason to do it, as in I don't just want free money.. and no one will give me it. There needs to be some solid video ideas for that to work) and I'm also thinking of what products I could pair up with that would work well. I might realize another idea of mine at 50K which was starting a nootropics company. It's getting overall pretty hot, and we're still so tiny!

Report #6 We're up to 746 subscribers and 111,938 total views. It's recently fallen back down to about 13,000 realtime views in the past 48 hours. I didn't advertise on Reddit really last night and today I could only do a little bit. Tomorrow I'm feeling a bit more advertising will happen but overall I'm just waiting to post a better video which will have a fair amount of subreddits it could fit into. I might have a friend's brother work on SEO for some of my videos, but we'll see about that. Overall I wish I could have better increases right now but I'm pretty grateful to be where I'm at. Definitely right on track for 100K, however I do hope to beat the goal BY FAR. Shoot for the moon and land amongst the stars. I'll be busy over the next couple of days working on the gaming channel.

And the next update will be a little later today.. so far up to 773 subs

Report #8 Total views: 120,627. Total subs: 823. Realtime views: 9,200+. Unfortunately I do not have the gaming channel still, so I'll just stop talking about it until I have it. I find it rather sad that this sale has been delayed by WEEKS by all sorts of things. Anything from Chase delaying my paycheck by a couple days, to Escrow customer reps not informing me social media wasn't allowed (even after I said I'm specifically purchasing a YouTube channel), to now Skrill taking multiple days to simply verify my identity (which by the way, at this point I hate it even more than PayPal. They locked me out of my account and they require 3 different forms of verification, which I'm only able to do them one by one.. not all at the same time.). As you can tell, I'm rather an impatient person when it comes to DOMINATING. I treat business like an ancient chinese Emperor would treat the battlefield. I move fast and take great leaps, I'm ruthless and I'll do whatever it takes to be victorious. I haven't been able to focus on my personal unfortunately as I've been rather distressed about this situation. If there's one lesson I can teach to everyone reading, and to myself, it's that investing in social media accounts will be incredibly painful. You must be prepared for anything and everything to go wrong. Even if you try your best to plan everything out, there's so many elements outside of your control. Paypal for example will screw the seller over because they don't support virtual items. Escrow, well you know. It's very hard to trust middleman and the other party. There will be scammers out there and you never know where the account has been and what has happened to it.

It hurts because I know how valuable this account is. And I will get it. Eventually. But it's not necessary for me to succeed. It'd help very much so.. however, worst case scenario, you must be prepared to let go of anything. The updates are rather boring at the moment but will quickly pick up the pace next month. We're approaching good numbers here.

Man it's good going. Will follow your journey

Awesome journey....Good Luck
and i m following too

Wow...this is definitely an impressive journey. Your reports are awesome. Thank you.
Thank you. subscribed

Report #9. Total subscribers now at 865 after a recent reddit promotion. Today's been a long day but I FINALLY was able to get the 63.5K channel. I've began uploads and we'll get it to tip-top condition in no time! It's a super exciting time and I feel like a newborn baby has just arrived. I love working with large channels. My total views now with my personal has reached: 124,962. Realtime views is just under 9,000.

Buying the channel in good condition would usually be 4-5 figures, however this was well under the price range. It's a diamond in the rough. It has some features to it that made me get away with the steal of a price. Unfortunately the old owner just didn't know how to treat it to it's full potential. It's been inactive for a while, so I can expect a lot of subs to be ghosts or will unsub, but I will have just enough to be able to get back up to 100K quality subs and from there it'll only be one of many in my fleet. It's very similar to site/domain flipping. This is the last investment I'll be doing for some time, but a big inspiration for the future is to get to a place where some of my mentors are right now. I mean, when you see someone discussing their recent sales of 6 figures or more for "OG accounts", that's when you get a burning desire to get there and do it even better. I'm falling asleep writing this though.. gotta get rest. GOod night

Report #10 Alright, first we'll begin with the gaming channel. I think I won't mention it for some time again, or maybe I'll make another journey for it, or I'll figure out something. But anyways, this is for my personal channel and the reason I'm mentioning it in the first place is that long-term it'll help me gain subs on here. Advertising right now would be silly as it'd just probably result in trolling and it wouldn't be the best utilization.

The channel was a diamond in the rough. I polished it within a few hours. I went through and deleted hundreds of copyright/blocked/bad videos and messaged YouTube. Since my account is in good standing, within a couple of hours I got monetization re-enabled. Now I'm working to get the channel unpartnered from its old MCN (should be no biggie, I've done it many times before, it's just a waiting game really) and then we'll be good to go. And see kids, this is why you always choose long-term over instant gratification. I feel a sense of relief actually.. I've felt a pain for far too long similar to what the previous owner of this channel might feel soon. The channel in its state was worth the fair price I bought it for. However as soon as I enabled monetization and activated it again, it immediately rose in its value. I know people who'd be willing to pay 5x what I paid for it immediately. But I know that the true value of this channel once I put 10K hours into it will be.. well.. insane.

My personal channel hit 900 subscribers. I'm pretty happy about that. We'll hit 1,000 in the next 2 days hopefully! Realtime views: 7K. Analytics, 129,194. The comments I'm receiving are well.. they're beginning to pile up. I like it! I'm trying to engage with everybody, but it seems like probably once I hit 10K it'll be close to impossible.

I think once I hit 50K I'll hire a helping hand for camerawork and all that. And I definitely want to upgrade equipment at 25K or so. As much as my channel looks like a strange artwork right now done by a confused painter, it's a work in progress! I will have it be perfect by next year. If you're going to be the best at something, it has to certainly look like it! I've slowly been taking advice from others and adding more jump cuts and trying to use stands that I found around the house and all that lol. I'm happy with where we're at here at the end of September. Next month's going to be even more exciting!

Report #11 We went down a bit today after an upload, although I was a little surprised. Losing a few subscribers to a video with only positive ratings? And my recent ones too have been pretty well received. Anyways, I'm glad to see I've gained some subscribers with 5 figure counts. Always fun to see that! Doing this a bit late as I just came back from watching Deepwater Horizon (great movie), but we're at 928! My most viewed video is about to surpass 34K, and quickly my second most viewed is coming on at a much greater speed. I think it'll hit 50K views by the time my current most viewed hits 37-38K. Total views, 136,163. Realtime views: 6,700+. Revenue for September was the highest yet, nearly $30 (dunno yet exactly, the last day matters a bit). Which is crazy good considering my niche lol where a bunch of videos are either demonetized or have bad CPM ads playing. Really don't mind as eventually my niche will turn into my biggest helper in promoting my content. The more unique, the more you'll stand out, the easier it'll be to market yourself. Plus for me, it's just being myself. No extra work needed.

Excellent share and read. Thanks a lot.

Report #12 943 subs, 139,730 views. Realtime: 6,700+. I feel like my videos have been at a standstill recently and recording my videos has been taking too many tries. I realize this is due to the set and setting. Therefore, I have decided to invest in my mental health. Most likely I will be travelling to California next week to meet up with my best friend and I'm very excited! California's going to be perfect for some lovely vlogs. I need my channel to have more of an adventurous vibe to it. When I lived by myself for 3 months this summer I had the freedom to go wherever I pleased and a lot of my vlogs were outside. It definitely helped and I feel there'll be more content to promote on Reddit once I'm able to speak about it. I'm saving the really juicy stories till I feel I'm ready to present them. Then once everything is set in motion, my eyes will be set upon being front page of reddit again. Things are going along smoothly.