3 Important Lessons I am Taking Into 2020 To Improve My YouTube Game

There are three lessons I’ve learned that I’m taking into 2020 and I feel like they might help some others as well!

WORK ON ONE VIDEO AT A TIME

Throughout 2019 I over-saturated myself into not doing anything. I would constantly have ideas for 3-5 videos floating around in my head and I would jump back and forth between them and scratch my head on which I should do and it would result in me never actually making ANY of them. Narrow your focus! Pick ONE video and make it! Then, when that’s done, pick another (ONE) video and make that! Which leads me into my second lesson…

NOT EVERY VIDEO IS GOING TO BE A VIRAL BANGER

One of the biggest things that held me back from creating in 2019. I constantly kept flip flopping back and forth between so many video ideas at one time because I was trying to decide which would be the most viral, which would be the biggest banger that the most people would click on and I would end up doing nothing. Don’t expect for every video to be the hottest shit, sometimes, it’s just a video and good practice… just pick something, ANYTHING! and make it.

DO SOMETHING EVERYDAY

Force yourself to do something every day!!! Whether you’re filming one segment, editing one clip or writing one paragraph of a script. Allot yourself one hour or 30min and dedicate that time to doing SOMETHING that will progress you. You can spare 30min a day and it will add up.

Obviously doing more is better, but if you struggle with motivation, start small and just make sure every day has even a little bit of progress in it.

Anyways… that’s the list! I hope it sparks some thought or motivation or helps some people.

Good luck in 2020 everybody

How to Make Your YouTube Videos Go Viral

Look for popular videos that are similar to yours. Check the source code of the top 5 videos by right clicking on each individual YouTube page (select ‘Source Code’) press CTRL+F and then type in ‘keywords’. You might have to jump to the second result by clicking the little arrow next to the search bar.

Copy and paste all keywords (tags) of each video into an empty document. Compare them and then pick 25 (not 30!) of these tags for your own video.

Make sure your description, title and thumbnail all match the most important of your tags.

Example

Tags: polygel, nail extension, nail art, nail polish, nail tutorial, nail diy, …

Title: Polygel Nail Extension Tutorial

Thumbnail: Image with Text [ POLYGEL Nail Extension DIY ]

Description: In this #diyvideo I show you how you can extend your #nails with #polygel all by yourself……

By using the same keywords/tags as your successful competitors your videos will appear next to theirs in search results and as suggested videos after their videos. Which means you’ll get at least some views. If your content is good enough and viewers keep watching your videos the YouTube algorithm will notice that and you’ll catch momentum.

5 Quick Steps to Improve Audio Quality in Audacity

I see people trying to boost audio quality in post with all these effects and layers, the truth is, you can’t improve low quality audio that much, and the more you push low quality audio, the more you distort it. so while there’s no way to get around a good mic, getting close to the mic, and acoustically treating the room, here’s what I do in Audacity after spending far too much time researching this.

Click the link here to follow along https://imgur.com/GJEJb3R

View post on imgur.com

Audacity

Step 1, noise reduction.

So after I record, I get 10 seconds of silence, then normalize that section to 0db, this shows other background noises you otherwise couldn’t see, so undo the normalize and just select the true background noise, as the cleaner the noise reduction sample, the less it will distort your audio.

Step 2, equalization.

people just like to add a base and treble boost and move on, however the human voice only goes down to about 100Hz, so I do a little base and treble boost as shown, then do a high pass. this removes some of the boomy-ness and muddiness from your audio.

Step 3, compressor

As shown

Step 4, normalize to 0db

I do this because only the peaks of your audio will hit 0db, leaving a good regular speaking volume

Step 5, hard limit to -3 as shown

Unless you’re a professional, less is more, so give these a shot and let me know how you go.

Will coding endlessly actually make you better and better at Python?

Question

By now I know pretty much all the basics and things like generators, list comps, object oriented programming, magic methods and etc. But I see people on GitHub writing extremely complicated code and stuff that just goes right over my head, and I wonder how they got so good. Most of the people just say code, code, code. I completely agree that helps in the beginning stages when you try to grasp the basics of python, it helped me a lot too. But I don’t see how you can continue to improve by only coding. Cause coding only reinforces and implements what you already know. Is just coding the projects you want to do, gonna get you up to the level that the professionals are at? How did they get so good? I kinda feel like I’ve hit a dead end and don’t even know what to do anymore. I’d like to know people’s opinion on this, and what it really takes to become a professional python developer, or even a good programmer as a whole whether it be python or not.

Response

This is a classic problem with people who self learn coding.

I’m a software engineer and Python is one of the languages I use. I’m not self taught but to get beyond where you are you need to start looking at computer science as a whole. You need to start looking into algorithms and data structures and also take a look at computational complexity (why your algorithm isn’t as fast as the other guys).

But I cannot stress how important algorithms and data structures are to breaking down that wall you’ve hit. Let’s say for example you have a sorted list of 1 million integers and you want to check if a number, lets say 1203, is in that list. You could start at the beginning of the list and work your way through the list. This is probably how you’d go about it now but this is really slow and bad. What you should do is use binary search. In computational complexity terms, the slow way runs in O(n) time while binary search runs in O(log(n)) time. Obviously the log of n is smaller than n so it must run faster. Knowing things like this is where you’ll get the edge over others.

I’ve seen questions like this being asked before and I’ve come up with a roadmap to follow to get you to a professional level, so I’ll leave it below again!Road-map

Here’s a Python road-map to take you from complete beginner to advanced with machine learning. I don’t know what area of computer science you’re interested in (AI, web dev, etc.) but I’d say do everything up to intermediate and then branch off. You’ll need everything up to AND INCLUDING intermediate to have any chance of passing a tech interview if you want to do this as a career. Hopefully, this provides some framework for you to get started on:Beginner

Data Types – Lists, Strings, Tuples, Sets, Floats, Ints, Booleans, Dictionaries
Control Flow/Looping – for loops, while loops, if/elif/else
Arithmetic and expressions
I/O (Input/Output) – Sys module, Standard input/output, reading/writing files
Functions
Exceptions and Error Handling
Basics of object oriented programming (OOP) (Simple classes).

Intermediate

Recursion
More advanced OOP – Inheritance, Polymorphism, Encapsulation, Method overloading.
Data Structures – Linked lists, Stacks, Queues, Binary Search Trees, AVL Trees, Graphs, Minimum Spanning Trees, Hash Maps
Algorithms – Linear Search, Binary Search, Hashing, Quicksort, Insertion/Selection Sort, Merge Sort, Radix Sort, Depth First Search, Breathe First Search, Prim’s Algorithm, Dijkstra’s Algorithm.
Algorithmic Complexity

Advanced – A.I. / Machine Learning/ Data science

Statistics
Probability
Brute Force search
Heuristic search (Manhattan Distance, Admissible and Informed Heuristics)
Hill Climbing
Simulated Annealing
A* search
Adversarial Search (Minimax & Alpha-Beta pruning)
Greedy Algorithms
Dynamic Programming
Genetic Algorithms
Artificial Neural Networks
Backpropagation
Natural Language Processing
Convolutional Neural Networks
Recurrent Neural Networks
Generative Adversarial Networks

Advanced – Full stack web development

Computer networks (Don’t need to go into heavy detail but an understanding is necessary)
Backend web dev tools (flask, django) (This is for app logic, interfacing with databases etc).
Front end framework (This is for communicating with the backend) (Angular 6+, React/Redux)
With frontend you’ll also need – HTML, CSS, Javascript (also good to learn typescript which is using in angular. It makes writing javascript nicer).
Relational database (MySQL, PostgreSQL)
Non-relational (MongoDB)
Cloud computing knowledge is good, (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure)

ResourcesBooks

Automate the boring stuff
Algorithms and Data structures in Python by Goldwasser (This should be the next thing you look at)
Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science
Slither into Python: An Introduction to the Python programming language
Fluent Python – Clear, Concise, and Effective Programming

Here’s some ones for other related and important topics:

Clean Code by Robert Martin (How to write good code)
The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt (General software engineering / best practices)
Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach (Networks, useful depending on the field you’re entering, anything internet based this stuff will be important)
The Linux Command Line, 2nd Edition (Install the Linux operating system and get used to using the command line, it’ll be your best friend).
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

Online courses:

I am not a fan of youtube for learning as you’re just being hand-fed code and not being given any exercises to practice with so I won’t be linking youtube video series here. In fact I’m not a fan of video courses in general but these two are good.

Udemy – Complete Python Masterclass (This is for beginners stage).
Coursera – Deep Learning Specialization by Andrew Ng (Advanced – A.I.)

Most importantly, practice, practice, practice. You won’t get anywhere just watching videos of others programming. Try dedicate an hour a day or 2 hours a day on the weekend if you can.

Source:  https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/eim1x4/will_coding_endlessly_actually_make_you_better/

“The Rules of PERF” at Dropbox

A more detailed explanation:

Avoid needless processing. This breaks down two ways
1. Feature design: Think hard before adding features that come with significant performance impacts — do you really need this feature? Is there a simpler way to do it which achieves most of your goals? Can you do it a simple way 90% of the time and only fall back to something more complex if needed? Can you skip several intermediate steps to get to the end result faster? (ex avoiding sorting a list)
2. Optimize execution by taking advantage of short-circuit evaluation and doing lazy fetching/evaluation. For conditionals, if you sometimes need to do an expensive check, but usually don’t, then see if there’s a way you can skip that check. Laziness: don’t fetch extra things from the filesystem until requested, if you often don’t need it.
  - Practical example: I optimized a routine (in Python) at work last month. We were processing text files a line at a time and removing control characters. To remove control characters we used a regex on each line (not the most efficient approach, fairly expensive). I added a quick check that iterated through the line of text and checked if any of the characters were within the control character range,and just returned the original string if not. Not as efficient as rolling a non-regex implementation, but since control characters are rare it avoids 90% of the performance cost and was much simpler & safer to implement.
Cache results of expensive operations to avoid repeating them unnecessarily. If you’re fetching info from the filesystem, cache it in memory if you are likely to reuse it (works well with lazy evaluation).
Batch it: if you’re doing a single operation often to many items, try gathering up the items to process and processing them in large groups. Often this is more efficient because it makes better use of caches (CPU/disk) and it permits you to write much tighter loops for processing. It permits reusing buffers, connections, SQL prepared statements, etc. It can improve branch prediction, permit use of SIMD instructions, etc where they would not work otherwise.
- Batching also makes it easier to fall back to something like the multiprocessing library to parallelize work.
Use software pipelining. This is kind of like batching: rewrite loops that run items through a series of steps/processes so you first do the same step to each item, then the next step. Sometimes can be evaluated much more efficiently by compilers/interpreters because it allows using SIMD instructions, avoids branch prediction misses, etc.
- May also mean using Unix/Linux pipelining as well: use a bunch of smaller utilities that pipe input from one to another. This is another application of the same principle, but has the extra advantage of being generally very efficient, and spreading work across multiple processors.
Use a lower-level language than Python to optimize the most performance-sensitive parts of the code. I.E. fall back to C bindings for intensive number crunching, crypto, etc. Optimized C can be several times faster than Python (or sometimes much more!). In general Pareto’s principle applies: 80% of your execution time comes from 20% of the code (and vice versa), so if you double the performance of the slowest 20% you can almost double your overall performance.

To Summarize

If you have a performance issue, you should try the following fixes in order (ie. try one and if that doesn’t solve it, go to the next possible fix):

Just don’t do whatever you’re trying to do. In other words, ask yourself if it’s really necessary/useful/something you might lose a client over.
Cache the results of previous calls. Maybe you can reuse them as-is, or partially.
Do a large number of calls in batch, maybe in advance or later, outside of peak operating hours. Or perhaps you need to set up a network connection to do what you’re doing, if that takes a while then don’t make a new connection for each request, bundle up a dozen and setup once.
Don’t add your stuff to an existing program, create a new and separate one that will take the output of a previous process. Decoupling, in a way.
If none of that works, only then should you look for a totally different way of doing it.

Further Explanation

There’s multiple explanations for these, which makes them deeper than they seem, but there’s a couple more parts:

Not doing work may include several ways of avoiding extra computation — lazily running expensive operations if not always needed, adding conditional checks before complex work rather than throwing exceptions, using short-circuit evaluation, or using more efficient algorithms / cutting out intermediate steps if you can get a result without them.
Yep.
Yep, but it doesn’t necessarily have to wait hours — batches of work can be handed off to other processes or utilities to process (makes better use of cores), and often you can write tighter loops that make better use of caches and reuse resources (connections, buffers, etc)
That’s Unix pipelining, and it’s good shit, but software pipelining is a more general version of the technique. Depending on your architecture one or the other may be more efficient — goes well with batching above though.
No, this is a reference to falling back on C bindings invoked from Python, and writing the really tricky bits highly optimized in a lower-level language. C can be several times as fast as Python (or more, with good use of SIMD instructions) if written efficiently.
- They didn’t do this often at Dropbox, because Python is faster to write and easier to maintain, but when they did this they got huge speedups.

Software pipelining

In computer science, software pipelining is a technique used to optimize loops, in a manner that parallels hardware pipelining. Software pipelining is a type of out-of-order execution, except that the reordering is done by a compiler (or in the case of hand written assembly code, by the programmer) instead of the processor. Some computer architectures have explicit support for software pipelining, notably Intel’s IA-64 architecture.

It is important to distinguish software pipelining, which is a target code technique for overlapping loop iterations, from modulo scheduling, the currently most effective known compiler technique for generating software pipelined loops.

Source:  https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/eip48b/the_rules_of_perf_at_dropbox/

My Free Affiliate/Display Ad Keyword Research Method!

Source:  https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/5tokrx/my_free_affiliatedisplay_ad_keyword_research/

Evening Guys,

This is the basis of my keyword research process, although I use some tools for parts of it now everything explained can be done 100% free provided you are willing to put the time in. This method can be extremely effective if you are using it for your own Affiliate/Display Ad sites as you have 100% control over the keywords you move forward with. I should probably have added this to my case study report a few days back to help people understand what I was actually doing but even this quick version is over 1500 words so I guess I was just being lazy :P.

I have tried to fix the formatting on my bullet point parts but its just not playing, sorry.

Keyword Aquisition

Head over to the Google Keyword Planner and select the “Search For New Keywords Using A Phrase, Website or Catagory.” Enter your niche or seed keyword in the “Your Product Or Service” field and press the “Get Ideas” button.

Some pointers on the headers of the data columns you will be presented with.

*Keyword – The keyword the rest of the data is relevant to. *Avg. monthly searches – The number of searches expected for that keyword. *Competition – The competition for people to show their ad NOT search engine competition. *Suggested bid – The suggested bid to be shown on Google search NOT the display network. *Ad Impr. – Ad impressions if you pay to advertise, useless to us. *Add to plan – Add to your plan to pay to advertise, useless to us.

Now chances are that you have a bunch of crazy high search range key phrases that are one or two words long on your screen. These are far too high competition for our methods so we are going to use some filter words.

On the left-hand side of the screen you will see a bunch of options, close to the bottom you will see “Keywords To Include”. Click that and a little window will pop up, this will force the results from the tool to be filtered to phrases that contain one of the words you enter.

Personally, I like to keep my display advertising keyword research and affiliate based keyword research separate but you can make a master list of these filter words if you like. Anyway, below are links to my filter words for the two keyword research types to help quickly remove the fluff keywords.

Affiliate Based Filter Words

Display Advertising Based Filter Words

Paste either or both of them into the little window that popped up for you and press apply. You should now be left with a bunch of keywords that are 3-6 words or more with much lower search ranges and hopefully lower competition.

Export the keywords that are left and save them to your computer, depending on how big you want your site you may wish to repeat this process a few times with various related keywords so you have a larger initial pool.

So at this stage, you have a bunch of potential keywords saved somewhere on your computer, now it’s time to try and work out their competition.

Keyword Competition Analysis

There are so many “Keyword Research” tools out there that rely on metrics from sites such as Moz, Majestic and AHRefs but Google offer a fair bit of data totally FREE if you use some of their search modifiers. I saw someone post a guide involving two of these on here a few days back but I will quickly cover the ones we are interested in.

For this example I will be using the example keyword of reddit keyword research, you can see from the screenshot below that search returns over 3 million results.

Now if we add the quotation modifier it will force Google to only return results that have that exact phrase in that exact order as shown below. As you can see, simply adding quotes to the term has reduced the search results from over 3 million to around 650.

Due to Google changing their algo this modifier is not as useful to us anymore because it ranks Niche, Secondary and LSI keywords higher in their on page algo.

Next, we have the inurl: modifier, as you may guess, provided you keep the keyword in quotation marks still. This modifier will force Google to only return results that have your keyphrase in its URL as shown below. We are now down from over 3 million to 35 results returned.

A year or so back this was a very powerful modifier as in my opinion having the keyphrase in your URL held much more weight for on page SEO back then but it seems to be losing power. Personally, I no longer use this modifier either but some of you may be able to weave it into your method.

Next, we have the inanchor: modifier. This is an excellent tool for blackhat niches as a common blackhat technique is to use automated tools to artificially create links with exact match anchor texts to the keyword meaning it can give an indication of how many black hats are trying for the keyword.

As you can see, this modifier returns 49 results giving the impression that a small number of black hats are targeting it. That said, this does not tell you the power of the links or give you any indication of how many total links the page has so it does have its limits.

Finally, we have the intitle: modifier, I personally think this is the most important one we have available as having your target keyword or key phrase in your article title is one of the most important on-page SEO techniques you can do. As you can see the example keyphrase ran with the intitle: modifier returns 35 results.

We are also able to string them togeather as shown below.

This search returns 18 results and each result has the keyphrase in its page title as well as in an anchor text of a backlink to the page.

Now the results returned can give a pretty solid indication of keyword compeition but there is no hard and fast number for what is low comp as it all depends on your ranking method. For my white hat projects I have been looking for keywords that return less than 100 results for the intitle:”” inanchor:”” query. When using automated tools in the past I went as high as 250 going as high as 500 if I was supplementing with a web 2.0 creator. If you are using a private blog network or buying backlinks then you can go much higher.

At this stage I use Scrapebox to automate the intitle:”” inanchor:”” query for me but if you don’t have it then you can manually search them each keyword with the modifier and add the results returned to your spreadsheet from the keyword planner and delete the ones that you feel are too high.

Checking The Top 10

Next, we move onto manually checking the top 10 results for the keyword. To make this easier I install the free AHRefs FireFox plugin.

This plugin will add the AHRefs data to your searches meaning you have some idea of domain strength as well as the backlinks pointing to the page ranked in google, I tried to add a screenshot of this but Imgur seems to have locked me in a loop of verifying ReCaptchas for some reason, you will see what I mean if you decide to add the plugin though. You can read their blog post here on what each of the data types mean.

For this phase I just search the keyword normally without modifiers and complete the below steps. Again the cut off points will change depending on your methods such as using private blog networks or buying links.

*Three or less results have a UR (URL Rating) above 30. *Three or less results have over 30 RD (Referring Domains) to the URL. *Three or less results have over 200 BL (Total Backlinks) to the URL. *Three of less results have a AR (AHRefs Rating) of under 25,000 at domain level.

Next I press Ctrl+F to bring the FireFox search tool up and paste my keyword in there as it will highlight the keyword in Green on the page to make it easier to see, next I complete the following steps.

*Three or less pages have my target keyword in their page title. *Five or less pages have my target keyword in their meta description (The website description).

If the keyword passes these then I go ahead and action it. In the past I have just thrown up 500-1000 words of content and blasted it with automated backlinks but this is getting much harder to do.

My more recent projects are based around putting up pillar articles that are high quality and high word count. You can use this free tool to quickly workout the word count of webpages. I just paste in the top 10 results for my keywords to see how much content they have to enable me to have a better idea of what I am up against.

In the past I have also used the free Quirk Addon for FireFox to help workout the keyphrase density of the top 10 results but I have dropped this as Google seem to have moved away from this holding as much weight with them.

Anyway, I hope this has helped a few of yous. Any questions just as and I will do my best to answer :).

Source – Shaun’s Guide To Keyword Research

WHAT NOT TO DO WHEN STARTING A YOUTUBE CHANNEL!

Source:  https://www.reddit.com/r/NewTubers/comments/ehs6yb/what_not_to_do_when_starting_a_channel/

I have been posting a few things on this site for a little while and although my stance is very clear on the whole subject, I continuously get asked if I will “Sub4Sub”.

Please let me explain to you why you should not ever get mixed up in the whole “Sub4Sub” illusion.

As many of you already understand and avoid this, please bare in mind many people still think this is the way to grow a Channel so please excuse me if you are reading this and it doesn’t apply to you.

—–

The most severe case I’ve seen on YouTube so far was a Channel with 35,000 Subscribers, hitting 90-110 Views per video.

Myself, at the time was hitting 175-185 Views per video at 250 Subscribers.

People who Subscribe to your Channel just to get you to Subscribe back will never watch your videos, engage in anyway or help you grow. They have a very negative impact, giving you the illusion your Channel is growing yet your engagement % and View count doesn’t seem to be reflecting how many Subscribers you have.

So you do what most YouTubers do when troubleshooting whats going wrong, you check out the analytics, where once again, due to the people “Subscribing” to you, the analytics are skewed.

A few months down the line your Subscriber count drops over night… this has you worried, WTF has happened? – YouTube regularly removes Subscriptions to Channels when said Subscriber does not view the content or engage, is a dummy account or is completely inactive. – This can be very disheartening i’m sure and I see many of you on here asking why you’ve lost 50% of your Subscribers and why your views are only 1-3% of your Subscriber count (as an example).

—–

Please do not engage with “Sub4Sub” requests. – I completely understand that its absolutely awesome to see that Subscriber count go up but if they are what I call “Empty Subs” it’s nothing but a fake number.

Genuine content creators let the Subscribers come naturally.

Those who only care about numbers jump into the “Sub4Sub” posts.

I’m very happy to say after the recent wave inactive removals by YouTube I didn’t lose a single Subscriber as I rejected any offers of “Sub4Sub” and if I did lose Subscribers, I would be very happy that YouTube wiped away the inactives and left me with the real number of fans I have to create for and removes any incorrect data from my analytics.

What are your thoughts, should you Subscribe to someones Channel just to get them to Subscribe to yours?

What I learned in 5 months, 100,000 views, and 1,200 subscribers – How I found viewers on YouTube

Original Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/PartneredYoutube/comments/ace44e/what_i_learned_in_5_months_100000_views_and_1200/

I’m seeing a lot of newbie (even newer than me) asking some very repetitive and generic questions. Hopefully these tips I’ve found through my first 5 months on the platform will help out some of these even newer than me creators with getting eyeballs on your videos.

The biggest issue I see with people is taking a scattershot approach to producing content and optimizing for the algorithm. These tips are focused towards working on YouTube in a deliberate manner rather than taking a scattershot approach to producing content. These tips are geared towards new/intermediate creators, and I’m in no way an expert on YouTube. This is just what I’ve learned in the few months I’ve been doing it, and have found a moderate amount of success with.

Your niche and your competitors:

First, find a niche. You should have a plan as to how you can do something better than everyone else on the platform. If you don’t have this you need to take a long and hard look at why you’re on youtube, if it’s just for fun then awesome keep doing you. If you’re looking to grow without a niche you’re looking at a long uphill battle.
Identify your competitors: When I was creating my channel I found and studied my two competitors. One was entertaining in narration but simplistic in animation the other created incredibly complex animations but was simplistic in narration, as well as storytelling and slow to produce videos. This let me identify my niche, I could produce content that was more entertaining in narration then one and more complex in animation then the other.
Simply put if you’re not doing something better then others then why the hell would anyone watch you over the others? This doesn’t mean you have to be totally unique, there are a shit ton of DOTA players on YT for example, but if you’re in the top 1% of DOTA players then congratulations, you’ve found a niche.

Optimizing for the algorithm (SEO):

There are two routes to getting your content noticed, the first is through optimizing for video / search recommendations on youtube. The second is through external promotion, which I will discuss in the next section.
I recommend using either tubebuddy or vidiq, both are free and super useful for search engine optimization. I use vidiq and love it. I also recommend ‘keywords everywhere’, an extension that gives and ranks both youtube and google keywords. I’ll be referencing these two plugins throughout this section.
First choose a keyword you want to compete in. This keyword should be chosen based upon how big your channel is, don’t choose something with a huge competition score if you’re not a big youtuber who can compete with the search results within. Try to find mid/low competition scores if you’re new. Also look at the competition itself, is anyone competing in your niche already there? Can you make a better video than them? Each rank you go up in the ranking seems to be worth an order of magnitude more views, so ranking highly can get you a lot of views passively. Optimizing for search results is awesome, because it creates a constant stream of views rather then the single release burst you get without doing so.
Choose keywords to compete in and craft your videos around them. Some of my most watched videos were created using this technique. When looking for inspiration for a new video simply analyze the competition scores, volumes, and CPMs of the keywords. A super competitive primary keyword might mean you should create a different video.
In terms of actual SEO you should have the main keyword in both title, description, and tags. Follow all of vidiqs tips for crafting tags, it’s super helpful.
Include common misspellings in your tags, and check to see what the volume of these misspellings are on google and youtube. The higher the volume, the more you should include it as a tag.

Self-promotion

Ok first of all some people seem to have this stigma on promoting yourself. Say it with me: ‘smart self-promotion is fine, spamming is not.’ When promoting you need to ask address a few things first:

Venue selection.
Content selection.
Appropriate posting habits.

Addressing #1):

first of all you need to make sure you’re promoting in the appropriate places this subreddit for example is not for self promotion, it would be wildly inappropriate to link dump here, so don’t. View forums and subreddits as a tool for boosting your channel, if you abuse that tool you’ll quickly be banned. Which removes a tool for your channel to grow, for example by no longer being able to get advice from here.
Good choices of venue can include niche subreddits, such as the sub for the game you play or general subs like subreddits for gaming in general.
A quick note on posting on subs that are specifically for self-promotion: don’t bother. Everyone just goes there to link dump and very few people actually view other creators links.

Addressing #2)

Make sure you’re Optimizing the content you’re posting for where you’re posting it. Reddit for example loves pictures and .gifs but hates long videos. So don’t post long videos to reddit, instead convert the highlight of your video into a .gif and post it with a comment saying ‘taken from this video: [ULR]. In short make the content as consumable as possible for your chosen medium.
It’s also entirely possible to double dip through this method. Post the video to the appropriate sub, then make a .gif highlight and post it a month later, then post a single picture if appropriate a month after. Doing this you can get your content in more forms being viewed by more people without reposting it.

Addressing #3)

This one really boils down to ‘don’t spam’. Post the appropriate number of times in the appropriate places. Generally follow the rules of the subs / forums your posting to.

‘Grappling hook’ technique:

This last way of getting views onto your videos is similar to optimizing for the algorithm.
First find a video that is doing well and related in some way to your video. This could be a competitors video, or something related in topic but different from your video.
Don’t choose an identical video, as people don’t want to watch the same thing twice so won’t click onto your video.
Once you’ve identified the video, use some elements from it’s tags and description in your tags and description. Don’t use non pertinent tags (against TOS), but any that would fit both videos should be used. This will help get your video highly ranked in their recommended video bar, which should net you a bunch of views from their video.
A good example of this is a competitor did a video on the campaign that had a certain battle in it, I then made a video about the battle itself and grappling hooked it. This got me a ton of views off the recommended video section of my competitors video.

Cross promoting

Why post on only one platform when there are so many out there? Posting your content on Bitchute, daily motion, and new grounds are all great places to post your content if it’s appropriate for those venues. Be sure to link back to your youtube channel since it should be your focus.
Collaborate with others in your niche. Reach out to both bigger and smaller youtubers and see if they want to collaborate with you. A rising tide buoys all ships, and I guarantee you they have subscribers that are interested in you as well. Even if it’s with a smaller youtuber, getting in front of their subs with a video you would have made anyway is always going to be worth it. I could dedicate an entire guide to collaborations, so for now I’ll just touch on this.

Let me know what you think of these short tips.

How To Get Monetized On YouTube In 33 Days [A Case Study]

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewTubers/comments/ec4n0w/how_to_get_monetized_on_youtube_in_33_days_a_case/

Here is the original Article I wrote for the community on my strategy:

Grow Your YouTube Channel From Zero With The Right Strategy And Not Just “GETTING LUCKY”

The main things I learned:

High CTR (Click Through Rate)
High Audience Retention

You need to focus on making sure a relevant audience is targeted by YouTube for your channel overall. Once YouTube sees a high CTR and high audience retention, it starts to look for an audience. Once it figures out what kind of audience watches your content, it pushes your vids like crazy and the channel sees real growth.

I would say high CTR is over 10% and videos 10-15 minutes get over 5 min watch time averages for high audience retention.

Search results don’t seem to matter as much as they would seem. With traditional SEO for things like blogs and branded sites, it matters so much and I recommend tools like SEMrush to help with research. But for YouTube, videos seem to be hardly found through search when comparing the results of successful videos to the impressions YouTube just hands out to your video if the algorithm likes you content. And YouTube likes your content when you can keep people on their platform and engaged in their brand. This is done by getting people to see the impression of the Thumbnail and Title, clicking on it, and then staying for a long time and engaging with the content through liking, commenting, subscribing, clicking an end card, watching another video of yours or watching another recommended video (therefore not leaving the website). This keeps YouTube a dominate website and makes their bounce rate stats insane compared to other websites on the internet. This generates trust from companies to know they can feel comfortable dedicating massive amounts of money from marketing budgets towards this arm of their strategy. Therefore, the channel wins, YouTube wins, and advertisers win.

Results (Proof of Concept)

When I originally posted this Post I was at:

731/1000 Subscribers and 476/4000 hrs watch time (Requirements for Monetization)

Currently the channel is at 53,000 Subscribers and 479,000 hrs of watch time

I was able to post my first video on October 24, 2019 and got the official “Congratulations” email from YouTube on November 25, 2019 to be approved for the YouTube Partner Program.

Edit

There seems to be some confusion as to whether or not the channel is monetized. Yes, the channel is monetized. Here are some screenshots.

Monetized Videos Icon

YouTube Welcome Partner Program Email

Original Post for Growth Strategy

Grow Your YouTube Channel From Zero With The Right Strategy And Not Just “GETTING LUCKY”
Aside from luck, I think there needs to be strategy as well. YouTube won’t help you grow at all from my experience until you prove your audience and trust as a channel. YouTube has to know it wants to promote your content as a suggested video to an audience it can find key interests in.
I tried to figure out the best way to show YouTube what audience WANTS to see my content. So, quality counts there. You need to make content people actually want to see. The key metrics in that measurement is: 1. Click Through Rate and 2. Audience Retention (Watch Time). If you have a decent CTR which I believe is above 8% and a watch time of 5:00+ minutes per video, you are good from my communication with other larger channels.
Ok, so YouTube now knows you have good content that people want to see. Now they need to know you are a channel that it trusts with content. This just takes time and consistency. I recommend daily uploads, bi weekly uploads, weekly uploads, monthly uploads. This depends on the type of audience you have. Example, most gaming channels need to pop out daily videos to be competitive in the market with an audience that demands daily binge worthy content. A review channel or a channel that does comedy sketches that takes time to make, may be a bit more forgiving and come flood your video with views when it releases every month or two. So, that quantity and consistency really relies on what other popular channels are doing and what the audience expects for your type of content.
So, now you have a consistent upload schedule that YouTube can trust, you have a high audience retention rate showing YouTube you have binge worthy content that people want to see, now who is your audience YouTube needs to suggest your videos to?
You have to actively work to promote your content off of YouTube alongside utilizing YouTube’s features for your video to help target an audience naturally.
There are three ways I have come to find that work so far:
Social Media
YouTube Ads (Video Promotion Option)
Keywords in: Description, Thumbnail title, Video title, Tags, About section
When it comes to Social Media:
Facebook
I have come to learn that Facebook is completely dead unless you have a group. But a Facebook page is useless these days unless you pay for it and with paid sources there are much better places to put your money.
Instagram
Instagram is dying as well, but not as bad as Facebook pages. Facebook has literally made decisions to stunt organic growth as a means to boost the need for you to spend money on ads to grow your presence online with their platforms. There are some strategies to grow on Instagram without spending money, but they have proven to not be as effective as other sources.
Instagram also goes out of its way to ban you for trying to build your profile too fast with follows, likes, comments, essentially anything the platform was originally intended for. Too many Bots and third party software took advantage of growth strategies and automated it to a point where Instagram got fed up with the spam and pretty bans you as a human for producing bot like results with Shadow Bans, cool down periods of Action Blocks, and flat out account Bans.
So, if you are willing to put up with it, try going on Instagram and find relevant account profiles to what kind of content you make, or go to popular YouTube creators Instagram profiles that fall in your category for content and do the following:
Look through their posts and start looking for a post that has less than average likes. This shows that the users the liked the content are really active and engaged in the content. Then go follow those accounts. This is done in hopes they will see your follow or follow request and either follow back or go look at your profile at least and then decide they may be a fan in the future of your content.
Make sure to go and like posts of the accounts that follow you back and take some time every now and then to go on your explorer page and like posts from people you follow. This shows people that you are real and not some spam account that just followed them to unfollow them later. You’d be amazed at how happy people get when they follow you and you go and like their posts. They usually return the favor and this looks good for your account and you can build some loyal fans that way.
Watch the stories of the people you follow. A lot of people go into their stories and see who watched their story posts and get excited when they see you watched theirs all the way through.
Do a search for hashtags or searches for keywords that are relevant to your type of content or audience and then go on a liking spree. Go like posts. This will give your account a possibility of being discovered by other people that look at who liked the post. It will also show smaller profiles that you liked their stuff and they may go check out your profile and follow you.
Don’t expect hashtags to do much. Instagram literally only shows about 30% of all content to people that follow you. In other words, even if people follow you, there is a good chance they won’t even see your posts because Instagram doesn’t push it into the explorer feed.
Eventually after your account ages well, and you start to get engagement on posts and people start following you, Instagram will trust your account more and then you will slowly start getting the original perks of being able to get discovered through hashtags and posts. Just don’t expect a lot of organic growth. Those days are over, it’s pay to play now.
As you can see, Instagram takes a lot of work, but if you are serious about it, put in the time and you will see returns on your effort. Of course you need to post to your account as well. Make posts about thanking them for follower goals, post clips of your videos, make announcements of your newly released videos. Your entire goal should be to push traffic to your YouTube channel in hopes of gaining new Subscribers and getting dedicated fans to view your content with high retention. Let the ego go of not trying to interact with people because you are a “big YouTuber to be”. Stay humble and interact with people and talk with them to build a bond with your fans. It goes a long way. You should always interact with your fans by responding to comments on posts and videos for as long as you can until your channel is so big that you physically can’t anymore. So, until that day comes, put in the effort to respond and thank people for everything.
Twitter
Twitter has proven to be pretty useless as well. Twitter is good for announcements and communicating quick thoughts to your audience. Just don’t expect to grow a Twitter account without having people actively searching to follow you. Hashtags just don’t work like they used to and you won’t build a large Twitter following more than likely posting away with hashtags or not.
Twitter is great for networking as the engagement on the platform is so terribly low that you can be seen by users that are otherwise usually hard to get ahold of. Ever seen an account with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of followers that literally gets like 5-100 likes per tweet? Yeah, all the time. Don’t expect twitter to get much out of posting. It’s good to have so people can go follow you there and interact with you. But overall, it’s a lot better for networking and connecting with other users.
P.S. Yes I know that there are examples of accounts that get excellent engagement on their posts, but this is rarely the case.
TikTok
TikTok is fresh and hasn’t stunted organic growth opportunities yet. Of course it still requires you to post content people want to see and engage in, but you CAN actually grow on the platform. My anecdotal example would be: I posted three days ago clips of my YouTube videos and I have gained over 4,000 followers and 72,000 profile likes on all the videos combined. I have also grown my YouTube channel by over 700 new Subscribers and 23,000 minutes of watch time. All within a 72hr period.
My strategy that I believe you should implement is to take your best clips out of your YouTube video and make it into a TikTok upload. And try to upload as much as possible. Utilize hashtags, and relevant keywords in your post, and ALWAYS put a call to action with “Full Video on YouTube Link in Bio” or something along those lines telling them where to go to find more if they like what they are seeing. Keep clips between 7-17 seconds ideally and leave them with a coherent point from the video that will make them want to check your profile and maybe go Sub to your YouTube channel.
Relevant factors I have noticed with TikTok to get views:
Likes – you want to try and maintain a good view to like ratio. I have noticed 10% is decent enough to have the video keep getting pushed into impressions.
Follows – if your video starts getting a lot of follows as a result, expect your video to go viral or semi viral. This is probably the most important factor I have noticed as a metric for virality: get follows from the video.
Profile Visits – people go check your profile. TikTok knows they found the right audience when people want to go see what else you have to offer.
Shares/Duets – when people share your content or duet it, it also shows TikTok that your video is socially worthy of this audience and trusts that the law of averages will play out and you will get impressions as a result.
Comments – comments show interest, but ultimately you want people to comment @ their friends. This garnishes more views and social proof of worthy content. It’s like a share within another form of engagement (comment).
YouTube Ads
If you have trouble figuring out what is trending or how to take advantage of new search traffic that enters the platform, then I recommend the YouTube Thumbnail Ad video promotion strategy. You can target anything on YouTube to have your ad as an impression on: Channels, Specific Videos, Audience Demographics from: Age, Location, Language, Household Income, etc.. If you hone in and target your audience well then you should have no problem getting views down to $0.01-$0.02 per view and you’ll be able to get a lot of views and engagement fairly quickly.
Just remember, with the YouTube thumbnail ads, you will usually get a lot of dislikes just because there is a social stigma around using “ads” to garnish views and grow your channel. But there’s nothing wrong with an ad, you are simply paying to get your content shown to people that otherwise would not know you exist as people are either not searching for your keywords or YouTube just simply doesn’t promote your channel or video beyond a few impressions. It’s a known fact that the top 3% of channels get 90% all of the views and less than 1% of videos get over 1 million views. So, to compete and grow an audience, YouTube ad promotions really work in my experience. You just have to target the right audience.
Though the dislikes may suck, the subs you get and positive engagement in the comments will help grow your channel and let YouTube know what kinds of people enjoy watching your content and it will eventually get recommended to the right people. YouTube’s algorithm needs to know who to show your content to and that the platform can trust your channel to put out good content that people want to watch. This is why CTR and Audience Retention is incredibly important. Boost CTR with good thumbnails and titles, boost viewer retention with great content that hooks for first 1 minute and then retains minutes 1-5 are critical.
Keywords
The first minute is the most important and the minutes from 1-5 are crucial to have the most captivating content in order to get the highest retention possible.
Create content around what keywords are being searched for. If you spend a lot of time making a great video, you want to get it seen. The best way to do that is to post content that people will search for.
Really use your description as an opportunity to get your keywords in your upload. Keywords are key to ranking and you can get all your relevant searching keywords and long tail searches in the description. This will help YouTube rank your video as people click on it, stay and watch, and interact with your content.
Thumbnail and Title:
YouTube wants a good CTR (Click Through Rate)
You get this by having a captivating thumbnail that makes people want to click when there is an impression. Avoid small text and a lot of complexities going on. Make it simple, easy to read text, and not have a lot going on. Also, make sure to leave the viewer wanting more. Don’t answer what happens in the video in the thumbnail, build suspense and desire with the thumbnail.
Make sure the title is captivating as well and generates interest. It needs to be relevant to the video and style of content your viewer base is looking for. Also use the Title as a way to capitalize on major keywords for search results most relevant to your content and the audience you are targeting.
Make sure to title your thumbnails and video with relevant keywords within and also add tags (meta data) within the image and video file.
Links in Description: If you want to guide people off your YouTube page and follow you on other social media, make the links clickable. They should be able to just click the link and go straight to your profile. People will rarely see your username and actively go search for you.
End Cards: make sure you have end cards at the ends of your videos. This allows viewers to continue to binge your content and get to know you better as a creator and want to keep coming back for more.
This is my two cents on the subject. Hope it helps. This is all my opinion and is subject to be completely wrong. I just simply believe these to be the reasons for my stunted growth or growth in general.

Edit – There seems to be some confusion as to whether or not the channel is monetized. Yes, the channel is monetized. Here are some screenshots.

Monetized Videos Icon

YouTube Welcome Partner Program Email

How I went from being a NewTuber to a . . . Not-As-NewTuber (75k subs, 10 months)

Hi YouTubing people. I was inspired by u/vibrant801, who made quite a blunt post the other day full of good information that’s not commonly shared on this subreddit. I have some to share as well. The advice and instructions I’m giving are not the end-all-be-all way to grow a channel on YouTube, and honestly there are a lot of channels that have grown way past my channel growth (Joana Ceddia for example went from 1 subscriber to 1 million subscribers in three months, and Lt.Corbis went from 50 subs to 150k in a week), but I have in fact gone from 36 subscribers to 75k subscribers in 10 months or so. I’m going to make a lot of blanket statements because it’s easier to just make the statements than to follow them all up with “in my experience”, but obviously they’re just in my experience. What I’m describing worked for me personally, and ultimately everyone will have to find what works for them, which could very well be the opposite of what I’m saying. Nonetheless, I hope this helps someone. It’s a long read but I split it all into standalone topics so feel free jump around or just read the parts that apply to you if you want.

(If growing a channel is not part of your YouTube goals and you’re truly in it to only have fun, then don’t get offended at my advice, just realize you’re not the target audience. I’m not going to PM you my channel, just use context clues if you’re interested. If this post is too long then just don’t read it, I gave you a nice little TL;DR at the bottom. Talk to your doctor before starting YouTube. Subscribe to Pewdiepie. Etc.)

CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON YOUR CONTENT:

FACTS: If you think it’s good, then it’s probably not as good as you think it is. YouTube IS a competition. Your videos are quite literally competing with everyone else’s videos on the homepage/recommended/suggested videos, so you’re in a competition with everyone on YouTube whether you want to be or not. Because of this, if your content quality isn’t better or up to par with everyone else’s, then you’re not going to make it.
GOALS: If your goal is to get more engagement, you’re going to have to make more engaging content in the first place. Sharing your videos on as many subreddits as possible isn’t going to do you any good if the videos themselves aren’t of a good quality. The goal is to be at (or above) the level of quality that the top channels in your niche have.
OBJECTIVE: Do some research on the channels in your niche. What do these channels have in common with their videos? How clear is their audio/video quality? How concise are the videos? How quickly do they get to the point? How professional is their shot set-up? How clear is the message they’re getting across? How clean is the editing? How good at they at whatever skill they’re using to make the video? Do that, or do better. It’s within your control.

CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON YOUR NICHE:

FACTS: If you don’t have a niche then your content won’t be successful. If you see channels that have all kinds of variety content that isn’t in a niche, then either they’re already a big channel, their sub-to-view ratio is bad, or they actually are in a niche and you might not have realized it. Having a niche doesn’t mean you can make whatever kind of content you want; you’re going to have to work to make it more and more specific.
GOALS: You want everyone in your niche to watch your videos (ideally), and you should have the best videos in your niche. It’s within your control.
OBJECTIVE: Identify your niche, and make sure it’s specific. Do you have videos on your channel that don’t fit into your niche? Remove them. You can always make a second channel for full creative expression or whatever you’re aiming for. On YouTube, people come back to watch the same things over and over, not just to see what you decided to do this time (unless you’re already a large channel, in which case why are you reading this and also please make a video about me, I could use the boost).

CHANGE YOUR PERPSECTIVE ON GOALS:

FACTS: Your goals should be as high as possible. If you get disappointed and discouraged because you don’t meet them, toughen up! If you have consistently low goals just to make yourself feel better when you meet them, then no wonder you have consistently low performance. You’re expecting it.
GOALS: Goals.
OBJECTIVE: I stole this method from a friend and slightly modified it. Make three tiers of goals. First is your Low Goals. These are the safe, boring, expected, reasonable goals you have for your channel. For me, a low goal would be getting from 75k subs to 100k subs this year. Bleh. Next, set yourself a high goal. This goal should be ideal. So what if you don’t make it? Who cares? Be proud of yourself for even trying. For me a high goal would 500k subs. It’s not completely unthinkable that I could get from 75k to 500k over the course of this year (people have done way more impressive YouTube feats). Lastly, set yourself a dream goal. Screw reality, this is YOUR goal sheet! You can write literally whatever you want. I would write 1 million subscribers. Am I going to get to 1 million by 2019? I’ll let you guys know if I do but statistically speaking that’s not really very likely. Who cares though? It’s fun to imagine. That’s the crazy thing about YouTube, your channel could blow up to insane heights . . . TOMORROW.

CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON NUMBERS:

FACTS: You don’t have to be consistent on YouTube to grow. You don’t have to upload regularly. You don’t have to upload often. Feel free to fight me on this, I will ABSOLUTELY FLOOD you with SocialBlade profiles (including mine) from people who post extremely irregularly. (I haven’t posted in over a month but I’m currently averaging 200 subs every day.)
GOALS: Focus on quality, not quantity. Don’t upload often, upload well.
OBJECTIVE: If you can somehow maintain a high-quality level and still post very often, do it. But if you can’t, just stop posting so often. Your video’s should be polished, not plentiful. Don’t take it from me though. Here are quotes from u/TheInternetHistorian (he has 1 million subscribers). “It’s far better to have a catalogue of 10 very high quality videos than 400 mid- or low-quality ones.” and my personal favorite, “If it takes a week to make a really good video. Take the week. If it takes you a day to make something mediocre but passable, then avoid that. Take the week. My channel has only uploaded a total of 32 videos in 2 years.” The man only uploaded THIRTY-TWO TIMES in 2 YEARS. He has a million subs. I’m pretty sure you’ll be fine. (For something more accessible, I went from 36 subscribers to my current count with just 22 videos).

CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON GETTING VIEWS:

FACTS: If you don’t have a substantial audience, you’re not going to get views unless the video is about something that people are already looking for. They are not going to click into your video just because it’s you, because they don’t know who you are. In order to get views on YouTube, you have to make videos on things that people are actively looking for, and the easiest way to do that is by talking about other YouTubers, trending topics, and pop culture. “I ALMOST DIED!! SPIDERMAN PS4 PLAYTHROUGH PART 6” isn’t going to get any views, because nobody is looking for that, but a “Why Insomniac’s Spiderman Would Never Run on XBox One” would work, because this is something that people would actually want to know. (this is just an example, idk the specs of either console and i don’t care lmfao i’m not an epic gamer)
GOAL: Get views.
OBJECTIVE: Find a channel that makes content in your niche, and click into one of their recent videos that has done better than other ones have. Look through the reccomended section and see if other people are making videos about this too. If they are, it’s for a reason, so make one too (if you want to). This only works from week to week though for the most part, so make sure people are still interested in the topic you’re talking about, or that you can bring something new to it. If you have a cooking channel, see if a lot of cooking channels are doing some sort of challenge or using some sort of recipe. Don’t look at a giant cooking channel that can get views on everything they upload, look at a smaller channel that is pulling big numbers and see what topics they’re covering. Alternatively, you could just talk about other YouTubers. The algorithm will treat that video somewhat like a collab video between you and that YouTuber, so the numbers could be much higher.

CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON THE ALGORITHM:

FACTS: “Manipulating the algorithm” is literally the only way to grow a YouTube channel. You’re manipulating it by even using tags, titles, and thumbnails in the first place. The YouTube algorithm is complicated but it is not difficult to use it to get more views. It is not out to prevent small YouTube channels from succeeding, in fact it is because of the algorithm that your channel has the ability to grow very large, rather quickly.
GOAL: Get the algorithm to promote you once, and then once it happens, try to keep the trend going upward or slow the downward trend as much as possible. Try the methods I’ve listed to get views, and then once you get them, take advantage of the algorithm’s promotion. Keep uploading similar content. In the first 8 months of my new channel, I gained 30,000 subscribers. Then in only two months, that number more than doubled. The reason I got so many so quickly is because I capitalized on my algorithmic bump. Instead of celebrating the temporary success like I did the first time I got views, I had to sit down and figure out how to make it more than temporary. The video that blew up was a commentary video about Shane Dawson. In the video, I focused moreso on the commentary than the artwork, and I used the artwork in the background. This was a big hit, and it was actually easier for me to make. So I followed up with another video about a different YouTuber and the same format, and that one got 300k+ views too. The next one I did about an art thread on 4chan, and that one got 100,000 views in five days, which was the quickest I’ve ever reached 100k on a video. At this point my viewcount is averaging higher than my actual sub count. The algorithm keeps promoting my videos more and more because I keep releasing similar content.
OBJECTIVE: If you ever notice even a slight upward trend, act on that. The algorithm is keeping track of both good and bad performances, so once you find a good one, recreate it for as long as feasible. You can do that without annoying your subscribers, since they subscribed for that content anyway.

CHANGE YOUR OPINION ON YOUR AUDIENCE:

FACTS: Your audience is real, and they’re already on YouTube. They just haven’t seen your content yet. If your video was watched by every single person on YouTube tomorrow, then you would be at the top of your niche the next day, as long as your content is good.
GOAL: Learn who your audience is, and get your content in places where your future audience will see it.
OBJECTIVE: Research. The first step is pinpointing your target demographic. Are you in your target demographic already? If so then half of the work is done. You know what you would actually watch, so don’t make content that nobody would actually want to watch. That being said, just because it’s interesting to you doesn’t mean it’s interesting to your audience. As much love as they have for you, they’re not going to keep coming back if your videos are consistently failing to appeal to their demographic. (Think about the YouTubers you’ve stopped watching over time because you don’t really feel connected with their content. Don’t become those YouTubers).

CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON YOUR SUBSCRIBERS:

FACTS: Your subscribers don’t care about every video you upload. The amount of people who click “subscribe” with the intention of watching every video is much lower than your sub count. Instead, people subscribe with the hope of seeing similar content. Even if they like your personality, they’re not going to watch a video that’s about a different topic than the one they subscribed for. There are obviously YouTubers who make all kinds of off-topic videos that do well, but you’ll notice they either have a large following already (JennaMarbles) or a low-ish sub-to-view ratio (penguinz0).
GOAL: You want as big of a percentage of your subscribers clicking into each video of yours as you can manage. The more views you get early on, the more YouTube will promote your video in the future and the more views you will get in the long run.
OBJECTIVE: Keep active track of how many subscribers you’ve gotten from each video. Two of my videos have gotten me 10,000 subscribers each, so it is extremely imperative that I keep making content similar to those if I want to keep that large portion of my audience engaged. Go to Creator Studio, and look at the analytics of all your biggest videos. You can see how many subscribers you’ve gained (and lost) via each video. Write them down if you have to, and pay attention to what kind of content that video was. The majority of the people who subscribed because of that video are expecting to see the exact same thing from each future upload, so you’ll be able to have a much better sub-to-view ratio. On my old channel my sub-to-view ratio was 10-20%, my current one is 100%+.

CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON OTHER YOUTUBERS:

FACTS: Other YouTubers are your biggest resource. The YouTube algorithm is set up in a way that tries really hard to put YouTubers in a similar category (think of the “Related Channels” section on a YouTube channel). You can use this to your advantage to get YouTube to treat your videos the same way it treats videos from larger creators (more engagement, more push in the reccomended sections, more fun overall). In addition to this, your entire largest potential audience is probably already subscribed to ONE other YouTuber. What if they all saw your video today?
GOALS: Use other YouTubers to your advantage. There’s nothing wrong with doing that. Look at how many of your favorite creators collaborate with/talk about each other in videos, and look at the viewcount on those videos compared to their other videos.
OBJECTIVE: Look for ways to talk about other YouTubers and put them in your titles. That doesn’t automatically mean negative commentary, nor does it mean your entire channel has to become about that. You’re surely creative enough to still make the video very much your video, regardless of the subject matter. Putting big YouTube names in your tags isn’t a shortcut to that.

CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON CLICKBAIT:

FACTS: If you don’t clickbait, then nobody is going to click into your video. If you think “clickbait is bad” then you’re not thinking about it creatively enough. The only kind of bad clickbait is misleading clickbait. You can clickbait anything. YouTube viewers are very forgiving of (non-misleading) clickbait at this point, because all the YouTubers they actually watch (not you if your titles are boring) are doing it. The definition is literally “content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page.” Again, if you’re not using clickbait, then nobody is going to click (because you’re not attracting attention and encouraging them to click in).
GOAL: Get those clicks.
OBJECTIVE: Research. Look at the channels in your niche that consistently pull views. Go to a channel and look at it’s most popular videos. How did they use clickbait? It’s most likely not malicious at all. Check the comments, I doubt people are complaining about it. Now, do the same thing for your videos. You put so much work into your video, so why would you shortchange yourself last minute by not getting the maximum viewership for your efforts?

CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON NEWTUBERS:

FACTS: If you’re a NewTuber, chances are your videos need a lot of work. Not every post on this subreddit is going to have the good info you need to help you with that work. If someone has 1000 subscribers then they really don’t understand how long-term growth works, so they’re ether only spreading misinformation, giving information that is way too general, repeating things they’ve heard from bigger channels, or giving information that only helps short-term for small growth. Or all four.
GOAL: Your goal should be to STOP BEING A NEWTUBER. This community isn’t a final resting spot, it’s just a launchpad on your way to becoming a larger channel.
OBJECTIVE: Pay attention to the people who are writing advice posts, they don’t always know what they’re talking about, nor are they always completely up front. (I have 75k subs, but what if I was only getting 300 views per video?) Learn to filter what works and what doesn’t. Take only the best information and put it into practice. I’m sure you care about your channel, so don’t do silly things with it just because someone said so in a reddit text post.

CHANGE YOUR PERPECTIVE ON “SELLING OUT”:

FACTS: If you just see using trending topics and popular people as “selling out”, then you are not being creative enough and you’re not giving yourself enough credit. Just because you’re using a popular topic doesn’t mean you’re forfeiting every bit of creativity you have. If you’re incapable of bringing anything new to the discussion about said popular topic, then try harder.
GOAL: Capitalize on trending/popular topics as much as you possibly can. That is how you will grow your channel.
OBJECTIVE: Pay attention to your niche. Weird things happen in it all the time. I know you have opinions on these things! It doesn’t have to be negative either, so don’t limit yourself in that regard. It’s not “selling out”, it’s being intelligent, no quotes. How else do you reasonably expect people to find your content if they didn’t already have an interest in what you were talking about. So you don’t want to be like the mindless drone of videos ranting about said topic? Then make your video better than all of theirs combined. And obviously it doesn’t have to be every single video on your channel. It’s within your control.

Anyway I hope you liked my book. Too bad I couldn’t put midroll ad breaks in the middle of you reading it. Again, this is all my experience. You’re free to disagree with any of my points. It worked for me, that doesn’t mean it will work for you. Have a nice day. If you happen to be one of my subscribers, have a VERY nice day. Okay bye.

TL;DR it took me way longer to write the whole thing than it will take you to read it, so read it ALL or I’m calling the police.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewTubers/comments/aemsq9/how_i_went_from_being_a_newtuber_to_a/