Transcript
I took a channel with 300 subscribers and blew it up with videos that reached 100,000, 200,000, and even 700,000 views.
And this rapid growth started with just one week of work.
But the question is…how did I do it?
Because here’s the exciting thing.
This is a 100% repeatable blueprint.
It can be done in any niche.
We didn’t show our faces in these videos.
And we earned thousands of dollars from YouTube ads even though we weren’t monetized at the start – you need 1000 subscribers to do that, and we were a long way below this figure…for a couple of days, at least.
I’m going to break down the 5 tactics that you can copy that we used to explode this channel’s growth.
And you don’t need to use all 5, you can pick and choose what works best for you. All 5 worked amazingly for me.
So this is a channel from my old gaming business that had just 300 subscribers from 8 videos uploaded over a 5-month period.
Then in March 2023, we went from 300 subscribers and not even being monetised to thousands of subscribers following along and thousands of dollars earned just from YouTube ads.
This was perfect timing for me because I was just launching my YouTube course, and straight after I announced it, I started working on this channel and it blows the f up.
And better yet…I did it in a niche I know nothing about.
We’re going to start with a simple trick that can help anyone ignite any channel.
And you can almost always do this in any niche.
Let’s take a random niche like personal finance.
And then take a trending topic within personal finance, something like ‘stimulus checks’ or whatever that free money was called that people in America were getting a couple of years ago.
At that time, a lot of people were searching for information around stimulus checks, so that could have been a good trending topic to start covering if you wanted to give a personal finance channel a little bit of jet fuel.
Taking a trending topic is an opportunity that happens a lot in niches like gaming and in tech where new technology comes out all the time, and there are similar niches too like films, cars, and so on. New products, new releases, they’re great things to talk about because there will always be a spike in demand.
And when there’s more demand, people need greater supply.
We were covering a video game that gets released each year, and the new game release was our ‘trending’ topic.
And covering something that’s trending was our first tactic.
The trending game we covered was WWE 2K23 and the funny thing is: I know absolutely nothing about the WWE or wrestling.
So how did I make this work? Well, I harnessed the power of the 4 remaining tactics.
For the second tactic I used, I need to ask you a question:
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Or, perhaps more relevantly, if you hit publish and no one is there to see your content, did you even make a video?
You don’t want to publish content to zero viewers.
And although you can kinda trust that the algorithm will eventually show your great content to people, what if there was a better way to reach an audience?
What if…instead of trying to show your video to viewers…it was the people that came looking for you.
How do you do this?
It’s easy.
By making titles and videos that clearly target things people are searching for, you can get people coming directly to your channel via search results.
And if you cover hyper niche, non-competitive topics, you might be one of the only results they can click on.
I love combining this with the trending angle because it’s harder to have lots of competition in a brand new space.
So I took specific questions that people were searching for within a specific game mode of WWE 2K23.
People were searching for information to help them get better at the game, and our content was there to help with that.
I don’t know anything about wrestling, but I have played the game mode we were making videos on. I liked the game a lot and happened to be quite good at it.
The videos were helpful. The tips I was sharing were genuinely useful. I’d figured out the game’s mechanics and could therefore confidently share knowledge. I didn’t know the industry inside out but I knew all that was needed to help lots of people improve.
With high quality research, you can make a search-focused video about basically anything.
After jumping into a trending topic and making some search-focused videos that were getting a few thousand views, it was time to switch it up with tactic number 3.
Instead of teaching people how to play the game, and focusing on search-focused topics, I’d take on a difficult challenge in the game and try to beat it.
It was a viral video attempt.
We already had an audience interested in getting better at the exact game mode I was doing a challenge in, and people were liking, commenting and subscribing to the videos, so whilst this wasn’t exactly what the channel was already doing, it made sense that there’d be an audience for it in theory.
And what happened next?
It exploded the channel’s growth.
Our search-focused videos started getting more views.
Our viral video started getting lots of views – tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands – so we doubled down and kept making more of them.
The first challenge has reached over 700,000 views at the time of recording this, and it went live when the channel wasn’t even monetized – you can see in the revenue graph that no money was earned in the first couple of days, but it then went on to earn nearly $3,000 from a single video on a tiny channel covering a hyper niche game mode.
But there were two extremely important factors that went into this.
And these were tactics 4 and 5.
How do you know if a content idea is going to work?
Well, knowing that people will be searching for it is one part, but there’s something else that helps with this too.
The answer is really simple:
All you need is evidence.
With the game we were covering, the game’s franchise releases a new edition on an annual basis, so…what got views last year? That’s a great place to start. Proven ideas.
After you have a proven idea, all you need is to do is steal it.
But remember…you must steal like an artist.
You don’t just take an idea and copy it, you take inspiration from it.
You can take the core idea, but you must add your own insight, tips, tricks, your own structure to the video, your own twist on a title and thumbnail.
Take what works, then just salt bae your own little twist onto every aspect of it.
We knew what people would be searching for.
But the viral challenge? Well, if those hadn’t been done before, which they had, but let’s say for arguments sake that they hadn’t, what could we have done?
It’s simple: look to other similar niches for inspiration.
Other games: FIFA, NBA 2K, any other sports game would suffice.
And remember: nothing is original.
The final tactic we used – before we talk about what went wrong – was something you’re going to remember forever.
No. Literally. You’re going to remember this.
We put unique effort into storytelling. We developed multiple storylines within videos. We put more effort into our videos from start to finish than all of our competition. We truly cared about viewer satisfaction – something that YouTube actually uses to figure out which videos to push – and ultimately it all boiled down to one thing:
We made videos that people were going to remember.
Our viral video only had 27.8% retention – but this is what happens when you have almost no returning viewers on an extremely long entertainment video, and you reach 700,000 people that are totally cold to the channel. 1 in 4 people that were brand new viewers were still watching after 37 minutes. The video received over 500 comments with no real existing audience.
That’s how you know you’ve delivered on viewer experience.
Other than a few angry comments about pronunciation, the videos were extremely helpful and enjoyable.
A blend of search-focused and viral content, covering a trending area, with proven ideas, and a commitment to delivering quality. That was our secret recipe for success.
But there was a major problem.
And this problem is something that almost every creator is struggling with – whether they’ve realised it yet or not.
The fact is…
This content creator dream that we’re all being sold…is terrible.
Watch the next video where I’ll explain everything.