I've been having trouble figuring out the balance between my very long videos and my very short videos and I feel like I've figured it out where people who watch my very long videos are there for the ideas.
They watch it when they're going to bed or when they're going on a walk, etc, etc.
For my shorter videos, everyone says they want shorter videos but then nobody watches them.
What I think is the answer is to just keep them very short, compact, to the point, hyper valuable and provide step by step actions that you can take to get a specific result.
So that's what we're here to do today.
So what I want to talk about in this video is exactly what I would do if I started over on YouTube from scratch to reach 100,000 subscribers or more.
But first, I need to establish my perspective and worldview around the creator economy in general.
First, I believe that all media will be the new media.
I believe creators are decentralized media companies.
I believe that most companies will be creator led.
The executives, the team, the marketing, they will all be composed of creators as the forefront of those things.
The executives are and will be on social media to create a positive brand image.
The marketing department will either be hiring creators or influencers to market their products or they will just be in-house creators.
And then the team itself, a lot of them, I feel like will shift over to contractor or creator work.
So people that the companies find on social media will get hired.
The people who are dishing out value, like programmers talking about programming, will be the first to get hired.
Or writers talking about writing, video editing, whatever it is, whatever your skill is, as long as you talk about it on social media, you're increasing your chances to get hired.
And of course, by building an audience, you're increasing your chances to just do whatever you want.
Of course, those are just my beliefs, but I have experience and it just seems like that's where the world is going.
But beliefs, in my opinion, are like gambling on the future and I'm very bullish on the creator.
So let's also double down on this by showing a tweet from Patty Galloway, who I think is some famous YouTube editor responsible for millions upon millions of subscriber growth for very popular channels.
YouTube is eating the world.
When people ask why I'm so all-in on this platform, I show them this graph.
YouTube is the new TV. YouTube is the new Hollywood.
YouTube is the new Netflix.
If you want to be a YouTuber or learn the skills to work with one, don't hesitate.
And as you can see, according to that graph, it shows that YouTube has pulled ahead of Netflix.
And that's just in terms of time spent watching content on that app.
Now imagine all social media compared to Netflix.
That's a lot. So let's talk about how I would actually grow if I started from scratch.
First, I was super inconsistent with videos.
I posted over the course of like five years, just randomly.
I've deleted a bunch of videos.
I've went from fitness and talking about acne on my face and like what I did to get rid of that.
I did talking head videos like Elliot Hulse.
I did food challenges and that got me to around a thousand subscribers, just kind of worthless at that point.
And if you know anything about my journey, you know that I'm a diehard ex or Twitter fan.
So I was building my audience there.
I knew how to control growth there.
It was a lot easier than growing on YouTube.
And I figured, Hey, if I can grow this audience on X or Twitter at the time, then I can just funnel that audience to YouTube and grow it there.
So that's what I did. I started posting videos.
I started leading my audience on Twitter towards YouTube.
And I grew to around 7000 subscribers.
Now, around this time is when I had a series of videos that brought me from 7000 subscribers to 150,000 subscribers in two to three months.
And since then, I've grown from around 25,000 subscribers a month to 75,000 subscribers a month, just by consistently posting one video a week.
Now I'm experimenting with two.
So the first thing I would do is just focus on posting one video a week and put a lot of effort into the ideas that are going into that video.
In my eyes, it's much better to have one quality piece of content that actually represents your brand rather than two to three to four just shitty videos that you spun up without even thinking about the color or the lighting or what you look like or what ideas you're even talking about.
Spend time on the script, collect ideas for it from the books you read, actually think about the things that you're going to say in the video throughout that week until it comes time to film.
So you aren't just going into the video with nothing.
The second thing that I just feel is necessary is you need to understand what topics you want to talk about.
So I would choose three ideas or topics to start talking about so that you can experiment with them.
So for myself, I did productivity, business, self improvement.
That's what I would do again, because that's what I like to read and study.
If you don't know what three topics you are going to talk about, think about the YouTubers you watch.
Think about what's in your watch history.
Think about your favorite books.
Think about the people you follow on social media.
What are the three topics you follow?
Because you're going to be being inspired and taking ideas from people in the ecosystem that you're already in.
And you're trying to join that ecosystem of creators that you're already a part of.
That's like the first step to any form of growth is just joining who you already follow, the community you're already in and switching from consumer to creator.
Now, I'm going to go over two specific growth methods, but before this, you just have to be creating videos once a week.
That's what I'm talking about around these three specific topics that you chose to do.
The second growth method that we'll talk about will bring more clarity to this and what to actually make the videos on.
But the first method is what actually brought me a lot of growth.
So growth method number one is to get people that inspire you on a podcast.
Why are we doing this? Because on something like Twitter, you grow not by relying on the algorithm, but by getting people to share your content.
And the people that share your content have to have a larger audience than you because you're trying to gain followers.
If just a bunch, if 100 small accounts are retweeting you, you're probably not going to gain that many followers.
You need to network and leverage larger audiences.
So how do you do that on YouTube?
Why do people continuously make drama forward content like, oh, calling this guy out or Natty or not on this guy?
It's because they have a large audience and the person making the video about them is trying to get their audience to watch it.
So by getting people on a podcast, preferably someone who has a large audience, you get to get them one-on-one and talk about their highest performing ideas so that the podcast does well on your channel and people follow you.
The key here is to talk about their highest performing ideas.
Don't just get them on a podcast and be like, hey, how are you?
Oh, what did your journey look like?
Go and research their YouTube, their social media, their products, their services, literally everything.
Look for their highest performing ideas, their top tweets, their most popular YouTube videos, what they're known for, and what will get people to actually click on the video.
So the way I did this and the reason my channel went from 7,000 to 150,000 in two to three months is because I got Justin Welsh on a podcast and we talked about solopreneurship and the one person business because he was very big on LinkedIn.
He was growing on Twitter.
He had a lot of authority behind his name and he knew what he was talking about.
So I got him on a podcast.
We broke down what you actually need to do to build a one person business and I posted that video and it started doing extremely well.
It did a lot better than any of my other videos and so it picked up views, it picked up views and I'm like, holy crap, this is growing to 10, 20, 30, 50,000 views.
I've never experienced this before.
I need to double down on this.
So that's step two in this method is you're getting on podcasts with people, talking about their best ideas and some of them are guaranteed to do well.
The one that starts to do better and better and better and better, that's when you start to double down on that idea and create more videos about that idea.
So the one person business is what we talked about in solopreneurship.
So I created the one person business video, the value creator video, writing videos on skills that you need to have as a one person business and those just picked up like fire and that's when it's like, okay, I see that this one person business topic does well.
I created the one person business video and after like three days of me posting the one person business video, it just popped off and that was one of my first videos that I don't think it hit 1 million first, but it got like to 800,000 views really fast and that's what led to a bunch of growth.
And then what most people don't know about YouTube is that your videos are going to all be very low view until one pops off and then they start watching the other videos.
So it's not that all of the videos you post before the one that pops off don't matter.
It's that you're creating a lot of value so that when one does pop off or do really well, people go and watch the other one.
So when I posted the value creator after or the stages of the one person business or the $1 million skill stack, all of those after it, everyone that watched that one person business video was coming back for more because they wanted to learn more about it.
So you have to write on that momentum and not just change around all the time and create random videos.
You need to create videos according to data.
So that's growth method number one is get a bunch of people on podcasts and then create videos around the topics that do well from the people that you get on podcasts.
If you don't know how to get people on a podcast, DM them and just be like, Hey dude, I have a podcast.
I really love your work.
I'd love to get you for one hour and just talk about your best ideas.
Here are the three topics I have in mind.
Tell them the idea, idea, idea.
Are you open for it? I'll send over my calendar.
People love to get on podcasts, even bigger people.
You're probably more likely to get a response from a massive account asking to get them on a podcast rather than just sending them a DM and being like, Hey, how are you?
Because people understand the mutual benefit of a podcast.
If you post a podcast and it does really well, I get a lot from that, right?
It's not just I'm not doing it for you.
I'm doing it for me. Okay.
Growth method number two is something I feel like very few people understand or even think about.
My entire YouTube strategy is to show up in the recommended video section of other channels or when people are watching other videos.
So people have asked me the reason I'm creating this video is because people are like, Dan, when is the YouTube course dropping or when are you going to tell us what you do on YouTube?
I've told you a billion times.
Two hour writer, my course on how I write newsletters is my entire process for creating YouTube videos.
The only thing that is not there is me just talking to a camera, right?
That's it. Writing the script, going off of the script, doing everything that I talk about in terms of writing.
That's how I grew on YouTube.
Creating the newsletter headline or the title is me creating a YouTube title or headline.
And the research process that I talk about into our writer is how I get my titles for YouTube.
So the thing with this method is that when you're watching this video right now, videos are showing up in the side, meaning that if people have created videos similar to the title of this video that you're watching, they're going to show up in the recommended because they know that you're interested in watching that topic next.
So how do we leverage that?
And how do we show up in that sidebar?
The first step is just understanding why are you watching this video because it's relatively new.
And if it gets a lot of views, that's a good sign.
So we're trying to do two things here.
We're trying to, one, capitalize on people watching a video that is somewhat new or that people are continuously watching.
The second thing is that we preferably want it to have a lot of views so that it has a high view velocity.
So a lot of people are watching it for a long period of time so that when your title or your video is on a similar topic, it's going to continuously show up in multiple of those videos recommended section because other people are going to be doing the same thing.
So when people are watching and going down a topic rabbit hole, you're going to show up in someone's thing.
If I watch 10 videos on how to grow on YouTube, and I see 10 videos on the side each time and I create a video about how to grow on YouTube, then I'm probably going to show up in there.
And if my title and thumbnail are good enough, then people are going to click on mine over someone else's.
And then if the value of my video is better than theirs, then they're going to subscribe to me.
So the most practical way to do this is to choose 10 accounts that you aspire to be like or that you want to create content like.
The second thing is to go to their most popular videos.
So go to their profile, go to my profile, click my name, click popular or filter by popular, and then choose five videos that you want to create content around and study the titles and thumbnails and start to think through, okay, why did these do well?
Now with these, you can watch the videos, but I would recommend not watching the video and recreating the topic like the entire video in your own words, how you would do it just based on the idea of the title or thumbnail.
Then when you create that video and when you go to post it, you want to make slight changes to the title or thumbnail so that it's not exactly the same, but it's still going to hit on the main keywords that will make it show up in the recommended section.
The one trap here is that if the videos that you're copying are kind of a dead topic, then not that many people are watching the video and you may not show up.
But since it was a more popular topic in the past, that does mean the title or thumbnail is more clickable.
So it still may do well. So the best thing you can do just in general is to make a habit out of studying titles and thumbnails, keep a swipe file of them, save your favorite ones, and create topics around the videos that have done well in the three topics that you choose to create content about.
When I actually peel back the layers, those are the only two ways that I have grown on YouTube, aside from just writing content and turning it into a YouTube video, right?
I test my own ideas on social media like Twitter and turn the tweet into the newsletter and the newsletter I already know is going to perform well because it's based off of an idea that already did well as a tweet.
And then when I turn it into the newsletter, that's my script for the YouTube video and then it does well.
So I talk about that in two hour writer, you don't need to get that course.
I went over everything here.
Go execute, try it out. I hope you enjoyed this one.
If you found it valuable, let me know.
Thanks for watching. Link in the description for everything, my book courses, free courses, et cetera.
Okay, bye.
