100 YouTube Subscribers!
by Dan YosuaFINALLY crossed this threshold on my main channel. Building a following on YouTube is a lot like building a software product, where your videos are your incremental product features and a subscriber becomes a "sale" or a "download". I've seen some good traction on my channel of late. Videos are getting a steady trickle of organic search and recommended traffic. I have a handful of videos now that are targeted for beginner and intermediate photographers/creatives that lean toward monetizing their hobby (the channel I want to see, basically). Enough that they might watch more than one and they stick around by subscribing. Very much feeling like I've started to hit what could be "product market fit" for the first time ever on a project...
-
3
First of all - congratulations! 🎉 I've checked your YouTube channel and I highly recommend to look at your YouTube SEO and do it ASAP. You are losing a lot of future value for yourself with your current approach.
-
1
What do you mean by that? I have decent CTR and watch time and I'm not sure what you mean by that.
-
2
TL;DR - you base your decisions on intuition and not data. Unfortunately, that's not how growing on the Internet works. I can tell you this because I'm an AI researcher so I know how to build YouTube-like algorithm. If you don't believe me - check other YouTuber's (like Sean Cannell from Think Media) - they will tell you the same.
For example, you tags are not optimized at all - there are not enough of them and you are using tags with 0 search volume. One of the best tags, for instance, is "canon rf 50mm" for your recent video and it's not in the list. Instead of using "canon rp kit lens" which has precisely 0 search volume you can use "canon eos rp" with >146k search volume with quite low competition.
YouTube uses tags heavily to match you with your audience.
YouTube algorithm doesn't work with decent CTR/watch time you mentioned - if you continue like that it will be always decent and you probably don't want this. In order to grow as fast as you can - you need to strike a nerve: meaning, create a content that will grow faster for a short period of time and then YouTube algo will spot you. The rest is history.
Use data-driven approach - you will be surprised how fast you will grow because you content is good.
-
1
I hear you, and I watch some of Sean's stuff, but I'm testing more of the Tim Schmoyer methodology to optimize for the human. For instance, I only scrawled out a few quick tags because I feel weird not having any... but I plan to do an experiment for the next few vids where I don't even include any at all. Whether his approach is best for growth is certainly up for debate but essentially it's "optimize for the human, not the algorithm". Make a clickable title/thumb combo, then shoot to have 50% of your audience still watching by the end screen, then deliver value to the very end where you pitch them the next video to string together a watch session without including ending language. Maybe also worry about that first line in the description. That's what they're seeing work best across their clients.
-
-
-
-
2
Awesome man! It's a grind. Three years ago I hit 100,000 subs myself. This year I started all over again on a new channel. As of right now I have 67 subscribers, my goal is to hit 100 before the end of the year. Keep going man!
-
1
I'd be super interested if you could do it twice, that would be so cool!
-
-
2
I remember how I felt a few weeks ago when I also passed 100 subs! Woohoo! Congrats
