Let’s talk about the significance of a 100. The path to anything great is understanding that it’s alright to start small. Building a channel on YouTube with a lot of followers is really the same thing. Just recently when I was interviewing a lot of my friends as well as marketers and people who are really crushing YouTube right now, I noticed a similar thing happening over and over again.
Just recently when I did this interview with my friend, Dan Lok, he said that it took him one year to go from 100,000 to a million subscribers but it also took him another year to take his channel from just 10,000 to 100,000 but it took him also a year to take it from 1,000 to 10,000.
Now it means that if growth was exponential on YouTube and that means getting your first 100, your first 1,000 subscribers is really the hardest and you will see this happen constantly, not just in any market. I will be showing you a few different examples here and what it is that you can learn from them. I will walk you through the numbers of views that you’ll need in order to have a 100 subscribers.
It’s alright to shoot videos that are not going to get the reach or the visibility that you might expect but to use it as practice and a training ground. I will also be showing you how you can shortcut and avoid that as much as possible so that you can build your channel utilizing the right foundation.
Take a look at what all these different things have in common. In my journey, just a couple of years ago you’ll see that I was getting about 300 views a day before I started doing things differently. Whether it is a sales page, a webinar conversion, a view converting into a subscriber, 1% is a very good conservative amount to forecast and predict how many views are necessary in order for you to get a 100 subscribers. Let’s begin with the end in mind.
In order for you to get that initial 100 subscribers, if you understood this 1% conversion, you roughly need video or videos that cumulatively have 10,000 views because if you can get a video that has approximately 10,000 views, you could get 100 subscribers. If you can have a video that has 100,000 views, you could maybe scale it up and get up to 1,000 subscribers.
What are some of the things that I wish I knew starting out? Number one is to make your videos discoverable. What does it mean by creating videos that are discoverable? How does a usual YouTube video get discovered?
Two main ways. It gets discovered either by somebody doing a search on Google or when a YouTube video appears on the search engines. Or number two, it would appear as a recommended video on the right side when somebody is watching a related video, mainly just these two main ways. So if you are starting out your initial channel and you’re thinking about getting your first 100 subscribers, it is crucial to create videos that people would search for.
Some of you would say, if you were to take a look at YouTubers MrBeast, Gary Vee or Casey Neistat, they are not shooting and creating discoverable videos. That’s because they have reached a level of critical mass and when you reach that level, you can do whatever it is that you want. But if you are starting off a brand new channel, it’s crucial to make your content discoverable.
How do you make your content discoverable?
- Choice Of Title
In my old videos, the title wasn’t based upon what people are searching for. It was just a good pattern interrupt that worked on Facebook but didn’t necessarily work on YouTube, and that’s why it wasn’t discoverable and getting any attention on the platform at all.
- Choice Of Thumbnail
What you need to do is have a good custom thumbnail and not use the thumbnails that YouTube might render for you. The goal of it is to increase the click through rate because when YouTube sees that you have a good click through rate, that is when they will show your video more as a recommended video.
Tip: Try to have a thumbnail that doesn’t overlap what you’re saying in your title. Utilise a different angle or a different hook. Avoid repeating what’s said on the title so that you don’t waste prime real estate.
- Choice Of Keywords
How do you utilize a thumbnail to stand out from the competition? How does a video get discovered and make it discoverable? By making sure that it is optimized by having the right key words in place. You gotta understand that Facebook is trying to learn and get data on what your channel’s about. So what you should do to optimize it initially is to constantly insert keywords and utilize different angles. The keyword needs to be in your title, your description, your tags, basically everything
- Choice Of Messaging
Part of the process and the journey is really discovering your voice, your messaging, knowing what to say and keeping in mind that your first 10, 50, 100 videos are going to be bad. So just think of it as a training ground to get better each time. You might not know what your messaging is at the moment, but with enough time and practice, you will figure it out along the way.
- Model What Works
One of the things that you can also do is to latch on to things that are already popular, videos that people are talking about. There’s the right way to do it and there’s a wrong way to do it. Here’s my take.
There are a lot of channels out there that purely utilize this by talking down on others whereby their entire channel is just bashing other people and riding on their popularity which I will never recommend. However, what I would recommend is to talk about things like what’s happening in the world or even reviewing gadgets, etc. Think about what people are searching for. It could also be a specific trend. There are a lot of people out there who build their channel just riding on this.
In order to build significance, there’s always two ways to do it. There’s a saying, if you wanna build the highest building in the city, there’s two ways of doing it. Number one is by tearing down all of the other buildings around you so that you’re the only building left, or by actually building the highest building in the city. So my goal here is to show you how to build that initial traction and how to build a base so that eventually you can shoot however you want.
I am constantly creating videos that are discoverable and that is why I made videos that follow the latest trends that people would like to know, for example, how to get verified on Instagram. I know that that is a discoverable video and what people are searching for on search engines.
- Consistency
Far too many people never reach a 1,000 subs, 10,000 subs or master anything in life, really because they just gave up too early and if you were to take a look at any skills that you might have mastered in life, just think about that for a second.
A skillset that you could be pretty good at, the skill set that you might be good at today or something that you have results today, was it because you were obsessed over it for a weekend? Or was it something that you just were consistent throughout? YouTube is the same thing. I only started becoming really consistent on YouTube probably about a year ago but I understand that to reach a level that I would like to reach, it’s about being consistent.
Building your first 100 subscribers and then your first 1,000 subscribers is really the same thing. It is about understanding that when you start putting your videos out there, it will be horrible. It will be bad. You’re gonna look awkward. You’re gonna stammer and that’s okay because that entire first 10-100 videos is for you to develop this skill set so that you reach a point where you realise you’re getting pretty good at it.
That is how you get to your first 100 subscribers. That’s pretty much what I did together with many of these different people that’s crushing on YouTube today.
