For a lot of starting Youtubers, growing a youtube channel can feel extremely challenging. I started the same way …. just like we all do. With 0 subscribers. And I was not a superstar who shot to fame fast. Instead, I had a grand total of 161 subscribers in the first 19 months of our youtube channel. But since then we have grown our channel tremendously and we now have over 12,000 subscribers. How did we do it? Below are a few lessons that I wish I had known when I was starting our youtube channel.

Commit First

I started our youtube channel (though the name was different at the time) on Jan 20, 2104. I put up a few videos and I said to myself that if this gains popularity and traction, I will pay more attention to it. Of course, as the graphs show, our channel had crickets for the first 19 months of our channel’s existence. And I paid no attention to it because there was no traction. I had gained 161 subscribers in 19 months which is a ridiculously small number. I was frustrated by this experiment and had almost decided to quit on it and try something else.

In August of 2015 my employer, Qualcomm announced impending layoffs. For a long time, I had been wanting to start my own business and I saw an opportunity here. I had no business idea or plan at the time … but I had a burning desire to start my own business. I knew that everyone who got laid off would get a severance package and so I decided to volunteer myself to be laid off.  Scary as it was, I walked into my Director’s office and requested that I be laid off. I was scared, nervous and excited … all at the same time.

As I drove back home that day, the magnitude of the reality finally struck me … I would not have a job or a paycheck soon. How will I make this whole thing work?

I had nothing figured out. I knew I had to get started on something ASAP. I loved reading and sharing what I was learning and I realized that youtube was the best medium to share my knowledge. So … I decided to redouble my efforts on youtube. I decided to commit to making my youtube channel work. Part of me was really worried. I started to think: “How will I make this work?” “It hasn’t worked in 20 months!” “Am I being delusional?” But even with all those doubts, I pushed along. And of course as you can see, we have been able to build a thriving channel adding over 12000+ subscribers in the last 19 months.

Way too often in business when we are starting off on something, we do not commit until we see any real results. But the paradox of this situation is that we will not see any results until we commit. We must commit first. Results will come later. “Commit first” is the mantra we must live by in our business.

Market your content

If you are a content creator, deep within you probably believe that if your content is good, the world will beat a path to your door. You believe that your content is so good that people will just share it. Deep within you believe that you should not have to market your content. So, you do not do anything to market your content. Or you do a poor job of marketing your content.

I learned this lesson the hard way because in the first 19 months of the channel I did not do anything to market my videos. I just let my videos sit there in the hope that they will be found. Classic rookie mistake.

You see, the videos I made in the first 19 months of the channel are also some of the most popular videos on my channel. But they did not become popular until I started marketing them. They had very limited views until I started pushing them to the world.

Here are a few simple marketing strategies you can use today:

  1. Make sure your video description, title and tags are search engine optimized
  2. Promote the video to your other social media channels as soon as you publish it
  3. Promote the video to your email list as soon as you publish it

There are a ton of marketing strategies you can use to market your videos, but if you are starting off, let me give you one PRO strategy that can literally give you 100 subscribers in 1 day if you do it right:

Promote your video on www.reddit.com

Find a sub-reddit that is in your video’s niche and post a link to your video in that Reddit. Here are a few keys to keep in mind when marketing on Reddit:

  1. Never come off as a marketer or others will instantly down-vote your post and you may never get a positive rating.
  2. Redditors are very passionate about the sub-reddits they participate in. If you try to be salesy, they will down-vote you very quickly
  3. Your titles and headlines will make a huge difference. This is the difference between amateurs and pros when it comes to using Reddit.

So with these 2 strategies, you should be able to take on the Youtube world and be able to grow your channel tremendously.

If you have further questions on growing your youtube channel, email me at: mani@2000books.com

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