- 2,644
- 25
- Subscriber Goal
- 250000
The formula is simple. Make a great video. That's it. For all of the mythos, the rhetoric and conjecture, all of the conspiracy theories about shadowbans and channel throttling, the deluge of whining about how YouTube hates creators or that they squash small channels and only promote Mr. Beast... all of this can be summed up into one very discrete rebuttal: Go make something great.
As simple as YouTube may be nobody is going to tell you it's easy. I can tell you all day long what works and there are many out there who make a modest career doing just that. Go make great thumbnails, improve your SEO, write better titles, practice better editing... and yet nobody could tell you exactly the thing that you need to do in order to make that jump to the next level. There are however some things that can be done to make an improvement to the performance of your content and give your videos their best opportunity to thrive on YouTube, and these are some of the biggest lessons that I have learned in the years since we hit that first 1,000 subscribers.
Study The YouTube Gurus, But...
There are tons of people out there selling themselves as the great minds of YouTube. Anyone who ever hit 100 subscribers on their YouTube channel thinks they can teach YouTube and there are zillions of kooks who hit 1,000,000 views on a Shorts video and are trying to cash in on these inflated metrics as a means of trying to sell you on their knowledge. Don't believe it.
This isn't a groundbreaking, new concept but what I have learned in the past few years is that even the information provided by the actual experts needs to be taken with a grain of salt. They can be right about the things they are saying and that correct information may not be relevant to you. Thumbnails are an excellent example of this; you are going to be told time and again that you need to improve your thumbnails (and guess what... you do). The thing is a great thumbnail is not the sum of an amazing photo mixed with the most impressive photoshop skills. Very few experts are going to tell you that all you really need to do to create a great thumbnail is capture a really intriguing image. No text, no fancy editing. You can capture attention with a simple photograph. This is a very difficult concept to describe, particularly when you are dealing with so many thousands of genres and niches out there. So it stands to reason that it is far more simple to explain to someone that they need to "improve their thumbnails" rather than explain the complex psychological processes that can be used to really capture someone's attention.
Ignore Your Analytics
At least for a couple of weeks. When you first publish a video it can be very easy to get wrapped up in that burst of data that pops up after the first 3 hours and that is about the most useless dataset available. Seriously, this is information that is heavily impacted by the most passionate members of your subscriber base... those who turned on notifications, memorized your publishing schedule, bought the shirt and track your social media accounts. Which is great. But when you are tracking data you want information on that guy who sees your video while he's scrolling through the suggested videos during his latest Back To Basics Adventures binge session. That is to say you want to know what works for the non-subscriber who found your video 90 days after you published it, when YouTube had a lot more data and could make a more educated decision as to the audience it needed to be served to. You want this:
The upturn in viewership at the end of the graph reflects a more valuable dataset.
Screw Shorts
That's it. That's the message. Sure, that 142,000 views you got on that one ridiculous Shorts video felt really good and padded your view stats. And you got nearly 100 subscribers from it. But for as much as YouTube is trying to integrate Shorts and funnel these viewers to long form content that is simply not the type of content that these viewers are looking for and those are empty, vanity metrics. Great for the ego... and that's about it.
Make Every Video Like It's Your Last
I was given some advice from a coach whom I admire and respect very much. They told me that if I wanted to scale my channel I needed to double the amount of content that I put out. So I did. I hammered out video after video and went from posting around 50 videos to nearly 100 in the following year and in doing so I tripled my views that year. But I did not produce a single video that stood the test of time. Not one of those videos still gets views today. I was filming like I regularly would but watering down the content. Those videos just weren't as thought out, they weren't special and they died out quickly. What's worse is I often found myself in a position where I didn't want to talk about my channel with someone because I didn't want them to check out the channel only to find that video... the dud that I just posted because I was focused more on fulfilling my demanding upload schedule than creating something worth watching.
So the following year I made a drastic change. Rather than focusing on getting that video out every Monday and Thursday I focused on taking the time to film better videos and spending the time needed to make them as good as possible. I ended up cutting the number of videos that I produced in half. This was the result:
Channel views in 2022 versus 2023
Not only did I experience a 33% increase in views for the year but I posted two of the highest performing videos I had ever published. Because they were quality content. These are channel-driver videos that are going to continue to produce for years. They are going to create views for other videos via Suggested, pinned comments, cards and end screens. And together these two videos are likely to outperform all of the videos I published the prior year combined.
My goal going forward? I want every video that I publish to be the greatest video that I've ever done. I want to see the look on every person's face when I tell them that I did all of this... and I did it all with a cell phone. I want to go toe-to-toe with the best in the field. I will not be defined by my subscriber count, I will not be measured by the number of views that I accrue on any given video and the value of my work will not be measured by the content of my peers. I will make a great video. Plain and simple.
As simple as YouTube may be nobody is going to tell you it's easy. I can tell you all day long what works and there are many out there who make a modest career doing just that. Go make great thumbnails, improve your SEO, write better titles, practice better editing... and yet nobody could tell you exactly the thing that you need to do in order to make that jump to the next level. There are however some things that can be done to make an improvement to the performance of your content and give your videos their best opportunity to thrive on YouTube, and these are some of the biggest lessons that I have learned in the years since we hit that first 1,000 subscribers.
Study The YouTube Gurus, But...
There are tons of people out there selling themselves as the great minds of YouTube. Anyone who ever hit 100 subscribers on their YouTube channel thinks they can teach YouTube and there are zillions of kooks who hit 1,000,000 views on a Shorts video and are trying to cash in on these inflated metrics as a means of trying to sell you on their knowledge. Don't believe it.
This isn't a groundbreaking, new concept but what I have learned in the past few years is that even the information provided by the actual experts needs to be taken with a grain of salt. They can be right about the things they are saying and that correct information may not be relevant to you. Thumbnails are an excellent example of this; you are going to be told time and again that you need to improve your thumbnails (and guess what... you do). The thing is a great thumbnail is not the sum of an amazing photo mixed with the most impressive photoshop skills. Very few experts are going to tell you that all you really need to do to create a great thumbnail is capture a really intriguing image. No text, no fancy editing. You can capture attention with a simple photograph. This is a very difficult concept to describe, particularly when you are dealing with so many thousands of genres and niches out there. So it stands to reason that it is far more simple to explain to someone that they need to "improve their thumbnails" rather than explain the complex psychological processes that can be used to really capture someone's attention.
Ignore Your Analytics
At least for a couple of weeks. When you first publish a video it can be very easy to get wrapped up in that burst of data that pops up after the first 3 hours and that is about the most useless dataset available. Seriously, this is information that is heavily impacted by the most passionate members of your subscriber base... those who turned on notifications, memorized your publishing schedule, bought the shirt and track your social media accounts. Which is great. But when you are tracking data you want information on that guy who sees your video while he's scrolling through the suggested videos during his latest Back To Basics Adventures binge session. That is to say you want to know what works for the non-subscriber who found your video 90 days after you published it, when YouTube had a lot more data and could make a more educated decision as to the audience it needed to be served to. You want this:
The upturn in viewership at the end of the graph reflects a more valuable dataset.
Screw Shorts
That's it. That's the message. Sure, that 142,000 views you got on that one ridiculous Shorts video felt really good and padded your view stats. And you got nearly 100 subscribers from it. But for as much as YouTube is trying to integrate Shorts and funnel these viewers to long form content that is simply not the type of content that these viewers are looking for and those are empty, vanity metrics. Great for the ego... and that's about it.
Make Every Video Like It's Your Last
I was given some advice from a coach whom I admire and respect very much. They told me that if I wanted to scale my channel I needed to double the amount of content that I put out. So I did. I hammered out video after video and went from posting around 50 videos to nearly 100 in the following year and in doing so I tripled my views that year. But I did not produce a single video that stood the test of time. Not one of those videos still gets views today. I was filming like I regularly would but watering down the content. Those videos just weren't as thought out, they weren't special and they died out quickly. What's worse is I often found myself in a position where I didn't want to talk about my channel with someone because I didn't want them to check out the channel only to find that video... the dud that I just posted because I was focused more on fulfilling my demanding upload schedule than creating something worth watching.
So the following year I made a drastic change. Rather than focusing on getting that video out every Monday and Thursday I focused on taking the time to film better videos and spending the time needed to make them as good as possible. I ended up cutting the number of videos that I produced in half. This was the result:
Channel views in 2022 versus 2023
Not only did I experience a 33% increase in views for the year but I posted two of the highest performing videos I had ever published. Because they were quality content. These are channel-driver videos that are going to continue to produce for years. They are going to create views for other videos via Suggested, pinned comments, cards and end screens. And together these two videos are likely to outperform all of the videos I published the prior year combined.
My goal going forward? I want every video that I publish to be the greatest video that I've ever done. I want to see the look on every person's face when I tell them that I did all of this... and I did it all with a cell phone. I want to go toe-to-toe with the best in the field. I will not be defined by my subscriber count, I will not be measured by the number of views that I accrue on any given video and the value of my work will not be measured by the content of my peers. I will make a great video. Plain and simple.
